Against the Odds
by oneclicklater
Summary: The girl that has always struggled to fit in sets out on an unlikely mission to win over the girl that lights up every room.
1. Chapter 1

_**A/N:** Yo. Just to let you know, this is a short story consisting of five chapters, and I haven't taken into account anything that has happened so far in season 3. If you're here because you follow my profile from that one Gravity Falls fic I wrote a year ago, I have more Gravity Falls stuff on the way soon :)_

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I'm going to tell you a little story about taking chances.

When I was seven years old, my parents moved me downstate to Los Angeles where I transferred to a new school, about halfway through its first semester. Even at seven, I knew I would be an outcast in the collection of smart, well-dressed children that was my class. They made me wear an obnoxiously large sticker on my first day that said _Hello! My name is Janna,_ when it may as well have said _Hello! I'm the new misfit._ I was the girl that drew skulls instead of flowers, the girl that poked the ants' nest at the side of the playground and watched the chaos unfold, the girl that stole her parents' matches and set fire to her cousin's Barbies. Somebody like that would not be hanging around with the dainty little blonde princess whose mom packed crab cakes in her lunchbox.

Which is why I was just as surprised as my parents when I came home one day clutching onto a glittery slip of paper - an invitation to a _real birthday party_ from _the coolest girl in school,_ Maria Williams. I knew it was one of those invite-everybody-in-class-so-nobody-feels-left-out situations, but my young heart still fluttered as I slowly realized what the jumble of colorful letters were telling me.

Maria was different from the rest of the class. Rather than unabashedly stare me down like the other gawkers among us, she barely even acknowledged my presence. She wasn't concerned with my hobbies, who my mommy and daddy were, whether I had any pets. That's not to say she was purposely ignoring me - on the rare occasion that our eyes did lock, she'd smile or wave. She just seemed content to let me be. I suppose that's what drew me to her in the first place.

Her hair was brown, straight, and silky. Her eyes matched. She wore hoodies and jeans, not dresses or skirts. At recess she played soccer with the boys, not jumprope with the girls. And I'd look up from my spot near the flowerbeds, my ant-prodding twig in hand, and watch her run circles around her male opponents, and I'd wonder if she even knew how fascinating she was. I never thought about why I was so intrigued with her. It was just one of those weird ways that children fixate on other children, wanting to spend all of their time with them for no discernible reason but being too shy to do anything about it.

That might have been why I was so reluctant to get out of my dad's car on the Saturday morning of Maria's party. I kept my seatbelt on, my arms folded, and assumed a stern look so he'd know I wasn't setting foot outside the vehicle until it was safely back in my own driveway. When he opened the door beside me and crouched at my level, I knew then and there that he would not be turning the car around, that whatever nugget of wisdom he had conjured up since hopping out of the driver seat would urge me up the steps of Maria's house and across the threshold of the balloon-adorned doorway.

"Baby, I know this move has been hard on you. And I'm sorry for that. But these guys are going to be your classmates for years, and you can't hide from them forever."

"They're all stupid and lame," I told him. "I'm not going in."

"You don't know that they're all _stupid_ and _lame,_ do you? Why don't you try to make friends with some of them and see if you change your mind?"

"I don't want to make friends."

"Now, we both know that's not true. I know you miss your friends back in Oakland."

I didn't say anything. I kept my arms crossed and my eyes on the seat in front.

Dad sighed. "Listen, Janna, sometimes in life you just have to take chances. I know you think that if you go in there everybody's going to look at you funny, or turn their backs on you, or point and laugh. That, my sweetheart, is your brain thinking up the _worst possible situation_ and convincing you that it's going to happen. And life rarely ever works out that way. Chances are if you go in there you're going to play some party games, you'll get a nice free lunch and some cake for dessert, and you'll get to hang out with Maria, too. You like Maria, right?"

"She's okay."

"And hey, if it really does turn out how you're thinking it will? The worst possible situation? It doesn't matter. Your life will carry on just the same, you'll just know that the people in that house aren't worth your time, and you can move on to worrying about more important people or more important things. You just have to take this chance, baby, this first step. Otherwise, there could be something great waiting for you behind that door and you would never know."

So I walked up the pathway bisecting the front lawn with my dad at my side and the wrapped box of coloring chalk in my arms. Maria answered the door with her mom and smiled at me. She took the box and placed it neatly atop the generous stack of gifts by the door. Then I stepped into her house, said goodbye to the comfort of my father, and everything turned out okay. I was the only kid to pin the tail on the donkey, I ate a huge slice of chocolate cake, and by the end of the day, Maria Williams was my first friend in a town where nobody knew my name.

On a mostly unrelated note, Maria Williams was also my gateway to the world of lesbianism, though I had no way of knowing that at the time.

I was nine years old the next time I went to her house. She invited me over for dinner after school. She showed me her rabbits, Fluffy and Rover, and I gently stroked that bit of fur above their noses and between their ears. I didn't want to pit them in a fight against each other, I just cradled them one by one in my arms and pet them. I was a more subdued version of myself around Maria. Probably because I didn't want to scare her away.

She led me upstairs to her bedroom, which looked like it had once been bombed with purple paint. In one corner of the room, a ceiling-high shelf housed more books than I'd ever seen in one place - though I'd never stepped in a library before, so that may have been why. She sank into her purple bedsheets and I apprehensively sat cross-legged opposite her. While she read to me what she called her favorite passage from a book called _The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,_ my fingers played nervously with the sheets in my lap, because all I could think of was that I wanted to kiss her. Her eyes were absorbed in the book in her hands, her lips looked soft and plushy, and I wanted to lean forward and kiss her.

I never did, of course. I remember feeling gross about myself for even thinking of it. It was slightly harder to fall asleep for months because I kept thinking something was wrong with me, but then a new kid showed up at school and kept talking about his two dads, and I didn't feel so bad after that.

I was never really close friends with Maria despite how much I sometimes longed for it, so after that day at her house I never got an opportunity to ask her if she ever thought the same things about me. If she ever thought about holding my hand or kissing my cheek. I got the feeling she didn't. If she did, I would catch her gazing at me from across the classroom like she always caught me. She would look away shyly and a smile would creep onto my face, because we were young and we liked each other and one day we would be together.

On my last day of elementary school, I looked up just before opening the door to my mom's car, and she was walking towards me along the road that all the parents would park on at pick-up. She had been walking home by herself for almost a year now. As she passed, her eyes met mine, she smiled, and she tucked her hair behind her ear. I wanted to say something, like, "I'll see you soon," or, "stay in touch," but the words didn't come out and I ended up staring after her as she disappeared down the lane with my mouth hanging open. I didn't know that it was the last time I would ever see her.

All summer long I contemplated whether things could have been different. I tossed and turned in bed in the middle of the day and thought about her long brown hair and her pretty freckles. After a while the daydreaming fizzled out, because I realized my feelings would most likely have never amounted to anything. We were very young. We were both very quiet. Even if both of us were madly in love with one another I didn't think either of us would have had the guts to do anything about it.

And then I got to thinking that I shouldn't be so quiet, and that I shouldn't go about my life like I'm treading on egg shells. I recalled my old man's advice, and decided that going into middle school I wouldn't be so reserved anymore. I pictured Maria's house and how I took the chance of entering it and I wondered how many doors I'd walked past since then that I hadn't opened, out of irrational fears and insecurities. I decided that when the _next_ person came along and made my heart beat irregularly I'd be a hell of a lot more open about it, because what was the worst that could happen? They could tell me to hit the road because I was ugly and my very existence disgusted them, but my life would go on, and I'd know that that person wasn't worth my time, just like my dad told me.

Enter Jackie Lynn Thomas.

Or, wait, I should mention briefly the three years between leaving elementary school and entering high school; a bunch of other girls in various shapes and sizes waltzed in and out of my obsession, and I learned a decently effective way of relieving myself of the urge to touch them. There were some boys, too, actually, but they were few and far between, and none of them ever sparked the same intensity inside of me that ladies could. I even kissed one of them, a kid called Jake. But, well, somewhere between his tongue swirling haplessly around my mouth and his - at times - abhorrent BO, I figured I'd forget about guys for the time being.

Okay, _now_ enter Jackie Lynn Thomas.

The moment we met is a vidid memory in the back of my mind, where it will remain for eternity, as dramatic as that sounds.

She was ahead of me in the lunch line. A nameless, faceless girl among many in my first few weeks at Echo Creek High. I heard her voice ask the lunch lady for a bag of salted chips.

"Out of chips," came the monotonous response.

"Oh. Sorry, could you check out the back? The lady that served us the other day said the same thing but there were some out back."

Lunch lady sighed.

This exchange bored me, until the girl muttered in my direction, "she must not get paid much."

"Didn't you hear?" I said, my eyes still finding more interest in the deep-fryer. "That's Mrs. Hazel. Her husband died choking on a bag of potato chips."

I finally turned and regarded her shocked expression. If anybody else's face had been in the place of hers, I'd have kept the lie alive, just for my own amusement. But, holy shit, her eyes were diamonds and her hair was crystal and she looked like the living embodiment of a goddess. And I'm not even exaggerating. It was _unfair_ how attractive she was, unfair to her fellow womankind. It was like God - or any other higher power there may or may not be - made her first, and then gave up with everybody he made after.

"I'm kidding."

Her laugh was music to my ears, but the dreary woman reappeared and announced, "no chips," and I could feel crystal-hair girl slipping out of my fingers.

I had to say something to keep me on her radar. Anything. "I have some chips in my bag." Yeah, okay, it was a little desperate, but it caught her attention. "You could have some, if you like."

Essentially, I had transformed into a new person within minutes. I was usually selfish with my food, even territorial, glaring at people passing by my table as if they were about to make a grab for it. But there I was that afternoon, sat across from a beautiful girl with a bag of chips split open between us. Being freshmen, we asked each other about our experiences in high school thus far. I didn't have a lot to say, because I'd been choosing to breeze through it unnoticed like every other phase of my life. I was pretty content just listening to her talk, though.

When the bell rang, she told me her name, I told her mine. "J-squad," she said, offering a fist bump. "I like it."

J-squad. Jackie and Janna. Janna and Jackie. It rolled off the tongue, didn't it? I was getting ahead of myself. Realistically, I knew she was about eight rungs higher up the social ladder than I was, and without the permanent possession of potato chips I'd be lucky to even smile at her again.

That's why I almost spat out my water when she appeared opposite me the very next day.

"Hey Janna," she said, pulling out a chair before hovering beside it. "Mind if I sit here?"

I swallowed the water too fast and it hurt my throat. Mind if she sits there? What kind of a question was that? "Sure," I choked out.

Jackie grinned and waved a bag of salted chips in the air, opened it, poured half of them out onto my tray.

The rest was history.

We saw each other nearly every day, and she'd always stop to talk and brighten up a fe minutes of my time in the mind-numbing penitentiary that was our high school. She wasn't always around at lunch, and I found out en route to the bathroom one day that this was because she also hung around with a group of skater kids out on the front steps. I remember pressing my face up to the glass like a child at a zoo as I watched her grind the concrete railing, and while I was somewhat nervous of all the attention she was getting from the guys, that was overshadowed by how much more alluring I found her on a board. She made everything look so easy.

I found out she lived really close to my house. Then I found out that she skateboarded to and from school, and _then_ , through a process of elimination that would make any stalker proud, I found out what time she rocked up to school every day. I knew it was lame, but all I had to do to see her every morning was leave home a few minutes later, so I did. I was expecting to develop some kind of morning ritual where I'd wave at her as she passed and she'd wave back. Maybe I'd eventually spice it up a little, get a bit more flirtatious, maybe I'd wink at her or slap her ass.

I got a _whole_ lot more than what I bargained for, in a good way. Rather than sail past me with her glorious butt on display, Jackie stopped next to me and offered me a ride, which entailed me squeezing onto the board behind her and gripping onto her shoulders.

I was about ninety-eight percent sure I was going to die, at first. Jackie really didn't hold back hurtling around corners, whether we were teetering on the edge of a busy road or not. The next morning, she brought me a helmet to wear, and that made me feel the tiniest bit safer for all of two minutes. But I got used to it, and when I perfected the art of waiting around at my locker pretending to look busy and not pathetic, she started giving me rides home as well.

For the first time in my life, I was able to talk to somebody I had a crush on without my words spewing out like they'd been translated to Chinese and back again. I attributed this to Jackie being extremely laid-back about anything and everything, so much so that she spread her nonchalance to anyone around her. We'd talk about our common interests - mostly video games and Netflix series, or which teachers we disliked most, or where we were going to meet up later that day to undress each other.

Alright, I made that last one up. We never talked about that. But a girl could dream, right? Regardless, I looked forward to leaving my house in the morning, I looked forward to leaving school in the afternoon, and I looked forward to falling a little more in love with her every day.

"I'm gonna teach you how to ride," she told me one afternoon.

"What?"

"I'm gonna teach you how to ride." She picked up her board, took two strides across my front lawn to where I stood. "Then one of these days, you can take _me_ home instead. I mean, after all, I _have_ been giving you a ride every day and you have yet to repay me."

I wanted to tell her I could repay her in other ways, and then lick my lips. But that would have been a bit upfront. And gross.

I chose to say, "alright, skater boy. Teach me how to ride."

"Right now?"

I shrugged. "I got nothin' else to do today."

The smile on her face made the butterflies in my stomach explode. She was inviting me to spend time with her, and she was happy that I'd accepted. So far, so good.

I let her into my kitchen and made smoothies. She sipped from a straw while smiling out of the window. She always seemed to have this look on her face like the chaos of the world outside couldn't touch her. I knew she couldn't be invincible; I knew some things in her teenage life must have bothered her. She never let it show, though.

"How long have you been skateboarding?" I asked her over the kitchen island.

She looked up at me with those dazzling blue eyes and said, "as long as I can remember." She pulled at the neck of her shirt until it stretched over her left shoulder, leaving it bare. My heart got ahead of itself and started to race. "Come look at this."

She could have said anything at all and I still would have bolted to the other side of the counter. She was showing me a scar on the top of her shoulder, a faint red line warping the natural beauty of her skin.

"I got that when I was five. My dad was teaching me to ride one of those Penny skateboards on the street outside my house, but I wiped out _hard._ Fell face-first into the pavement and a shard of glass sliced through my shoulder here."

"Can I touch it?" There was nothing really perverted about that - I would have asked the same of anyone. Scars are cool.

"Go ahead."

I traced my finger along the scar, overextending as much as I could without being too obvious. Once I was done committing the smoothness of her skin to memory, she covered it back up with her shirt.

"I haven't injured myself once since that day, though," she said with pride.

I, on the other hand, injured myself after about fifty-seven seconds of riding Jackie's board without her guidance. See, the problem with being insanely attracted to your teacher is that you will inevitably attempt to show off to them with no concern for the lack of skill in whatever you are being taught. In this instance, I decided I would weave from side to side on the sidewalk like a snake, because that would surely impress her. I fucked it up the moment I tried to turn a single degree to the left.

My feet took on a life of their own and hurled me into the grass lining the sidewalk. My elbow must have hit a rock or something, because - once my body had settled and my head had determined which direction the sky was - I found a small trickle of blood running from it. Jackie sauntered over to me like she'd seen this coming from several thousand miles away and knelt at my side. She reached into her backpack and tenderly explained how she'd packed a miniature first aid kit into her bag the day after I started riding to school with her, then she stuck a band-aid over my elbow.

Yeah, I was in love. I had never felt so wanted before.

I didn't let that one fall deter me from learning to skate, just as Jackie didn't when she was a kid. By Christmas, I was proficient enough to drift along sticking to the center of the sidewalk, even around corners, but I struggled to keep up an above-laughable speed with the added weight of a passenger. I also had to take a long detour to avoid the steep hill on our route to school, because I kept bailing in fear right at the top of it and leaving Jackie to quickly gain control of the board.

I knew she was only teasing me about not repaying her for the rides every day, but I still couldn't shake the thought that I was taking advantage. So I started to bring gifts to school - small, silly things, like the bags of chips that she liked, or a diet-cherry-vanilla Dr Pepper that took three convenience stores to find. I don't think she understood the reasoning behind these gifts, though, because she started bringing me things in return. The strangest thing that ever landed in my lap at lunch was a little turtle plushie, because I think I mentioned once that I found turtles cute. I couldn't tell whether that plushie was the cutest thing I'd ever seen, or if I just loved it so much because it was from her. Either way, the turtle earned a permanent place beside my pillow. Sometimes, I'd get angry and throw it across the room, because I hated how simply looking at the thing could stir up such mushy feelings inside of me. It would bounce off the wall without a sound and I'd pick it up within seconds, silently apologizing to its beady black eyes. To the turtle, I was a deadbeat abusive partner who would never change her ways, but I supposed it was better to take my mood swings out on an inanimate object than on anyone around me.

It wasn't long before something happened that I'd always expected, dreaded, but repressed in the back of my mind. In the end, it wasn't one of the skater boys that stole Jackie's heart, it was a guy she'd known since elementary school called Marco Diaz, who I knew through a mutual friend of ours, Star Butterfly. Yes, her actual name was Star Butterfly. She had a magic wand and was literally from another planet, but I won't bother explaining that here because I don't want to take up days and days of your time.

Anyway, Marco was a nice enough kid, I guess. Here's the thing: When you're attracted to people of the same sex, no matter how funny or charming or pretty or caring or flirty you are, there's an upwards of ninety-percent chance that somebody will take no romantic interest in you purely because of the body parts you possess. I usually didn't let this get to me too much, but with Jackie it was different. Truth be told, I cared about her far more than any of the girls I'd taken interest in before. I loved her as a friend and I loved her as more.

So it stung a thousand times harder when I found out through word of mouth (one mouth - Star's) that Jackie had asked Marco out, and not the other way around.

Being good friends with both Jackie and Star, it became an inevitability that hanging out with either of them would include hanging out with Marco. And rather than four friends hanging out, it felt more like Star and I were accompanying the new couple on their dates. It didn't hurt too bad. I'd equate the pain to being stung by a bee, except the stinger was coated with bone-rotting acid, and it stung you while you were tied to a bed of nails with a steamroller fast approaching, and the bee was actually a red-hot cattle prod crafted by Satan himself.

Okay, so it hurt pretty bad.

We went to this diner on the outskirts of town one Saturday, called Barney's, and they had the gall to start making out mid-dinner, like they were the only ones in the restaurant. I seriously considered grabbing Star by the shoulders and locking lips with her, just to one-up their audacity. I could have killed two birds with one stone - publicly announcing my interest in girls, and demonstrating to Jackie how much better at kissing they are. In the end, the rational portion of my brain decided that it would also be the quickest way to lose three friends at once.

I used to like the strawberry milkshake at Barney's. Now it just reminds me of Marco's tongue down my silver-haired queen's throat.

Now, here's where things get messy and complicated and so dramatic that I could hardly believe they were happening in my otherwise boring life: Marco was dating Jackie. But, although neither of them would admit it out loud, Marco and _Star_ quite blatantly had a thing for each other. It was written on the walls in bright pink paint that was apparently visible to everybody that knew the two of them _except Jackie_. I have literally no idea how this happened. Did I mention yet that Star and Marco lived together? Yes, the girl that he was dating was blissfully unaware of what Marco traveling around on inter-dimensional adventures (again, I won't try explaining this), sometimes multiple times per day, with his opposite-sex-very-much-single-best-friend-slash-roommate might have led to.

I insist that Marco was a good guy. But when it came to balancing the two most important young ladies in his life, he was an _idiot._ I made it to the end of my freshman year without getting too upset that the girl of my dreams was off dating a boy. That boy's parents threw an end-of-year party at their spacious house a few days into summer vacation. And that boy screwed up his first relationship on the very same evening.

I didn't witness it myself, but Marco virtually abandoned her in the middle of a room with her mouth hanging open because Star wanted to talk to him. That would have been kind of excusable, except he managed to do exactly the same thing not an hour later when Star re-appeared and proclaimed her love for him in a dramatic act of spontaneity only Star could pull off.

Now, look, I love Star. I think she's great. But you don't abandon Jackie Lynn Thomas _twice_ to run after _anyone_. They had a brief, mostly one-sided discussion about their feelings in front of everybody in the room and then Star ran off upset, and Marco followed her up the stairs. Neither of them gave a single shit about the presence of Marco's current girlfriend. I was actually standing right next to her when it happened. The look on her face was of dumbfoundment.

Moments after, the chatter of the crowd around us rose from hushed whispers to normal volume, and I looked to my right to find Jackie was gone. I spun around, looked towards the front door, picked out the teal highlights in her hair through the dense cluster of heads that I didn't care about. With very little grace or patience, I shoved my way through herds of bodies and out into fresh air. She was stalking along the sidewalk, away from the light of the house. I called out her name but she carried on into the darkness. I cut across the Diaz's front lawn, nearly impaled myself on a cactus. Jackie turned around the second time I called her name, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw the tears in hers.

"I know, you told me so," she said, her voice wet with misery.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that I had informed Jackie on numerous occasions how neglectful I thought her boyfriend was over the last few months, because I was a bit of a jealous bitch.

I swallowed hurt. "I didn't come out here to say that."

She shifted from side to side, smeared a tear across her cheek. "Did you know that they liked each other?"

"I... had a feeling."

She looked hurt and confused and angry. I flinched, braced myself for the outburst, but it didn't come.

"I think I need to be alone right now," she said, and turned on her heels.

She passed under a streetlamp and her hair shone, but her usual radiance wasn't there to compliment it. I stood in the dark with my feet glued to the concrete and I thought, _I'll see her again. Even if not over summer, I'll see her when school starts_.

But then as Jackie exited the yellow glow of the streetlamp and became more of a silhouette, I saw darker hair, darker skin, and suddenly I was staring after my young friend Maria walking away from school and out of my life.

I kicked my ass into gear.


	2. Chapter 2

With my hands stuffed in my pockets and a frown of determination, I charged forward. Jackie Lynn Thomas was single again and potentially fed up with guys, but I had to put that aside for a while and be her friend.

I had clunky feet, according to my mother, so I was about a bus-length away from Jackie when she heard me tailing her. I would be a terrible assassin.

"What are you doing?" she asked me, her arms folded.

"Walking you home."

"Didn't you hear what I just said?" Her tone wasn't mean, just exasperated.

"Yeah, well, I don't really believe you want to be left alone right now. Believe it or not, dude, but I've gotten to know you pretty well over the last year." I took another step toward her. "Remember when your parents went away for the night and you asked me to come over?"

The faintest hint of a smile tugged at her lips. "And you were in the Philippines, so I had to call Becky instead."

"That's right. Let me make it up to you now. Let me walk you home."

We drifted along through the backroads of our neighborhood, our shoulders bumping lazily from time to time. We didn't say a word, and I think both of us knew that the silent companionship was bringing us closer together. We'd never really needed to 'be there' for one another - like I've said, I had an easygoing life, and if Jackie didn't, she did a great job of hiding it.

She invited me in to her room, which I couldn't have said no to if I tried. While the lecherous side of me screamed with joy to sit where my girl-crush slept, I was developing this underlying feeling that we may have been better off as friends. She was sitting in her desk chair fiddling with the sea shell around her neck, and I was perched on the side of her bed firing off joke after joke and every one of them was landing. She dropped a complaint here and there about Marco or about boys in general, and I nodded along murmuring agreement as if I'd actually had a boyfriend before.

The point was, I was _good_ at being Jackie's friend, and the more I thought about me and her being together, while my fingers massaged the bed sheets and I gazed into her cavernous eyes, the more I became convinced my dreams were unrealistic. I had to draw a line between fantasy and reality. Even if I was granted a miracle and Jackie fell head over heels in love with me, who was to say that I wouldn't become her next Marco Diaz? What if, years down the line, a man or a woman sat in the same spot I was sitting as Jackie regaled them with stories about her nightmare ex-girlfriend, Janna Ordonia?

I left her bedroom with a newfound clarity, a pledge that I would not risk jeopardizing what was becoming my closest friendship just for some action in my love life.

Then she kissed me on the cheek, and all of that wisdom crumbled to pieces. I had just opened the front door when it happened. "Thank you for keeping me company. You're really sweet," and then she planted her lips on my skin for a split second.

Needless to say, I panicked. I managed to splutter out half-coherently, "goodnight," and then I hurried down the front steps of her house without turning back so she wouldn't see the tidal wave of blood that pooled in my face. As soon as the crack of light projecting from the doorway across her overgrown lawn disappeared, I leapt out onto the sidewalk and fist-bumped the air. My stomach cartwheeled all the way home, where I returned to my fantasy world in which Janna and Jackie was still a possibility.

I didn't hear from her for two weeks.

I was very passive when it came to communication - it was rare for me to text anyone without a message from them first. My mom called it "being antisocial." I told her, "I'm just as happy reading a book by myself for hours as I am trading messages back and forth." A couple days of radio silence from Jackie was fine. But that turned into three days, which became four, and by the fifth a little worm of insecurity had wriggled into my brain and set up camp for the foreseeable future.

Destructive thinking patterns set in. My mind played the last moment I saw her on repeat. Each time, my body language while exiting her house seemed more and more transparent. It was easy to believe she had picked up on my behavior and now didn't know how or whether to broach it. Hell, she could have had her suspicions about me already and kissed me merely for a confirmation.

My bouts of anxiety were only heightened because it was summer vacation and I didn't have enough hobbies to take my mind off Jackie for sixteen hours at a time. I considered that Jackie had gotten back together with Marco and that was occupying all her time. I tried to contact Star to get an update on the love triangle she had created, but she was out of town. And out of the planet. Marco was also supposedly AWOL, which didn't support my theory that he had won Jackie over again.

I think my rock bottom was the Saturday afternoon that I lay in bed and literally counted the lines in the design of the ceiling. I got to forty-six before I realized I needed to get my shit together. I glanced out the window, saw a man that must have been in his fifties jog past my house, felt a burst of motivation. I donned some shorts, a tank top, I swapped my beanie for a Nike cap. I downloaded the heaviest rock playlist I could find, cranked the volume up (and then lowered it because my ears were delicate and I didn't need to damage them for this moment to be meaningful), and set foot into the wide open world.

My legs got tired after ten paces. But it was okay, I pushed through it, because I was a strong, independent woman. I didn't need my friends; they could fuck around in an alternate dimension for as long as they wanted, I didn't care. I didn't need Jackie, because-

My ringtone interrupted the metal. I slowed down, pulled the phone from my pocket, and stopped in the middle of a road. Jackie's name illuminated the screen. I stared at it for a few seconds, as if I'd forgotten what the buttons did, then pressed the green one.

Her voice was like the prettiest birdsong to my ears. So soft, so calming. "Turn ninety degrees to the left," she said.

I did. There she was, on the other side of the street, phone to her ear, grin on her face. Just the sight of her plunged me into a sea of peace and comfort, but just as all of my muscles had relaxed a car horn sent me right back to the surface. I spun around, made eye contact with an angry douchebag in an overly flashy car, and he had the nerve to honk me again.

"Okay!" I shouted. "Asshole."

I scurried up to the closest pavement, watched in disdain as he blazed around the corner, and then crossed the street through a cloud of petrol fumes to where Jackie stood laughing at me. I blew the bangs out of my eyes and tried to feign indifference at seeing her. I wasn't sure why.

"Hey, Janna."

I _meant_ to say something like, _how are you?_ or _what's up, Jackie?_ or anything else remotely normal, but instead I blurted out, "where have you been?"

"Around." She glanced at her feet, shifted from side to side, held out a bag from some store I'd never heard of. "To the mall," she grinned.

I was lost for words for seemingly no reason. Could two weeks of absence make somebody a stranger?

Sensing that I wasn't satisfied with that answer, she added, "I needed some time to feel sorry for myself, I think. I, um... I really liked Marco."

I nodded slowly.

"But I'm back," she said, with a playful punch to my arm. "Wanna hang out?"

Jackie came over to my house seven times that summer. Even though I knew we were friends, it still surprised me a little every time she expressed interest in hanging out with me and me alone. I had low self-esteem, I guess. On the first time, I paused _Skyrim,_ swiveled around in my desk chair and found her slumped up against the wall, a few pages into a book from my bookshelf.

 _Time and Again,_ was the title. I recognized it as one of the books I'd not-so-covertly stolen from my dad's collection years ago just so I could fatten up my bookshelf a little. I had never read so much as the blurb. About an hour of silence passed, and by the time she had set the book back in its place she was forty pages in and totally absorbed in the story.

Several afternoons just like that one followed. She would show up at my door, often unannounced, and sit in my room for hours reading while I played video games or otherwise "rotted my brain," as my mother would put it when she poked her head into my room. Jackie never asked me if she could borrow the book and take it home, which I took to mean that she enjoyed being here. That made me giddy.

She explained that the book centered around a man that travels back in time to the late 1800s, where he falls in love and battles with the indecision of choosing between two lives. Naturally, I walked down to the local secondhand bookstore and bought a copy of _11.22.63,_ because a few minutes on Google told me that the books had certain similarities. I spent far longer than that trying to slot it into an inconspicuous spot on my bookshelf, but the thing had 700 fucking pages and stuck out like a sore thumb. I was growing so flustered trying to jam it between two _Harry Potter_ books that I forced myself to take a step back, breathe in, and consider just what on earth I was doing. Jackie already liked spending time in my room. I didn't need to lay out bait to entice her in.

So I took the book to her house, casually handed it over to her while she scoured her Netflix queue for something we could watch. Her eyes lit up scanning the back cover. I lived for that childlike wonder on her face. She hugged me tight and told me thank you. I silently begged her to never let go.

On the very last day of summer, the sun shone down on what I consider a pivotal moment in my life.

It happened at the beach. I didn't really care for the beach. Salty water that irritated the skin on my legs, sand in every orifice of my body and every electrical device I was stupid enough to bring, and the occasional naked child running circles around my towel flinging a plastic shovel back and forth. I got more stress than enjoyment out of the beach.

But, I didn't want to spend the last day of a vacation that passed far too quickly cooped up indoors, so I accepted the invitation on Facebook. It was all arranged by one of Marco's friends, and I saw scrolling through the invite list full of friends-of-friends that Jackie hadn't responded. I called her up, convinced her to come along, promising that I would shield her from any awkward encounters with either Marco or Star, who were apparently back on earth and whose relationship status was still a giant question mark.

We set up camp on the opposite side of the beach to them, placing our towels around Hope and some of Jackie's other friends. The sun was set to bake us all in the hottest temperatures recorded for that year, so I had no qualms about ripping my shirt and shorts off and revealing my two-piece at the earliest opportunity.

What followed felt surreal. I was standing, lathering up my body with suntan lotion. Jackie was sitting upright on her towel, a few feet in front of me. When I began to rub my belly, I happened to glance down and find her staring right up at my chest. That in itself wouldn't have roused too much suspicion, but it was the way that she looked so quickly away and wrung out her hands that sent my brain into overdrive and a surge through my heart.

I blinked. Wondered if I was seeing things correctly. Once I was over the initial shock, I knew I had to capitalize on the moment.

"Hey Jackie, will you get my back?"

The other girls around us were sprawled out with their eyes shut; they took no notice of my request. Jackie, however, hesitated like I'd asked her for the meaning of life.

She eventually said, "sure," and ambled over to me. I lay on my front with my heart thumping into the sand, but I was otherwise composed. She knelt at my side and rubbed the cream into my back slowly, using all ten fingers, starting at my shoulders, avoiding the strap of my swimsuit. If I owned the rulebook for determining sexual attraction based on massage pattern, this information might have been useful.

I noticed nothing else out of the ordinary at the beach that day. But I didn't care, it didn't matter, because I had that one thread of hope to hang on to, that one lapse of composure from Jackie. When school started the next day, I was riding on a high.

We fell right back into our old routine. I waited on the corner of my street, she approached me on her board and challenged me to jump on without her having to stop, and without catapulting the both of us into the road. I was successful at this roughly one in five times. That day was one of those one-in-five days. It was going to be a good day.

We rode up to our lockers as newly crowned sophomores, no longer the youngsters of the building. I hopped off of the skateboard, Jackie stayed glued to it. A quick glance further along the row of lockers told me why. Star Butterfly was leaning back against the brick wall with Marco Diaz's arms around her neck. They were chatting, lost in their own world. To tell the truth, I'd lost an ounce of respect for both of them. Disappearing from our universe for several weeks with no communication, followed by the now obvious ignition of a romance with no disclosure to me.

"You okay?" I asked Jackie.

She sighed and kicked up her board, smiled at me. "Yeah. I'm over it," and there was a wealth of conviction in her voice. My heart danced with glee.

I _loved_ Halloween, so my personal horror movie marathon began on the first of September and usually wrapped up in mid-November, once I'd gobbled my way through all of the leftover candy that trick-or-treaters didn't take. When I mentioned this to Jackie, she expressed great interest in joining me that year. I was starting to feel like everything was going to go my way, always, forever.

On Friday night, I surfed the web for a pirated copy of _Get Out_ that didn't look like it was shot with a 1992 camcorder, set it to play on my monitor, and sat back in bed with a bowl of popcorn at my side. The only difference this year was that Jackie Lynn Thomas sat the other side of that bowl, also in my bed, and that scared me much more than what the average horror movie could throw at me.

 _Get Out_ was good, but it evoked zero fear from either of us, so the following Friday I rolled back the years and put my DVD copy of _The Shining_ in my computer. I had also had the revelation that the bowl of popcorn I'd been so accustomed to eating week after week was putting a lot of distance between me and the thing that I _really_ wanted to share the bed with, so I swapped it out for a bag of M&Ms, which took up far less room. It also meant our fingers had a greater chance of touching as we reached for the bag at the same time. Yes, these were the things I spent my Thursday evenings thinking about.

Having seen all of the horror flicks I owned a handful of times, it had been a long time since I'd gotten a scare out of _The Shining._ The twins couldn't do it, nor the little boy with the knife, nor the... well, I won't spoil the movie. You should go and watch it. It's pretty decent.

Anyway, the same couldn't be said for Jackie. She breathed a shaky sigh of relief when the end credits began to roll, and she had jumped so many times throughout the movie that the only thing to frighten me was whether she'd ever come back.

But she did. And on the fourth week running, with _Alien_ blaring out of my desktop speakers, something kind of incredible happened.

An abnormally cold night had fallen over California, and Jackie had pulled the covers up to our waists. That alone got my blood pumping, but I'd like to personally thank Ridley Scott and everyone else behind _Alien_ for the jump-scare toward the end of the movie, because it made Jackie uneasy enough to shift over and lean against my shoulder. It was the warmth of human contact blanketing the left side of my body, it was coconut shampoo filling my nostrils, it was everything I had ever wanted. In my dreams, it was the moment that I'd glance down to the head on my shoulder and she'd look up at me with those eyes and we'd kiss, and sink into romantic rapture.

I had to stay grounded, but I also had to take a chance at _something_. Otherwise I would never know.

My fingers led the tentative charge at Jackie's hand. Under the covers, I found her palm. She responded instantly, her fingers interweaving with mine, and it sent a jolt of unparalleled excitement through my bones. We were connecting on a level I had never climbed to before, a level I'd only ever reached in my rambunctious imagination. I didn't know what it meant for my future, or our future, but it filled me with hope - actual, palpable hope - and when it came to girls and relationships, this was a first.

When the movie ended and she hopped out of bed to stretch, everything felt cold. "Do these movies really not scare you?" she asked.

I kicked back the sheets and shrugged. "I have thick skin," I told her, jumping up and ejecting the DVD from my computer.

"You actually do," she said, walking over to my desk and picking up my hand. She trailed two fingertips along my palm. "It's very rough."

The close contact had less of an effect on my heart than it usually would. My confidence was blossoming. "You should hang out in my bed more often," I said. "You'd find out all sorts of things about my body."

A scenario flashed through my mind where she slapped me and stormed out, but she just giggled with her hand over her mouth like a little girl. "Right," she said, "that movie was _long_ and my mom wants me home for dinner, so I'll see myself out."

"Alright," I sighed. "See you Monday?"

"You will. Ciao, dude."

I waited for the last of her footsteps to fade out, then flumped onto my bed and inhaled her scent that would linger in the sheets for the next day or two.

I went out to dinner with my parents over the weekend, and my mom asked me why I was in such a good mood. The question caught me off guard; I assumed I was still operating in my default mode of indifference towards everything.

I looked between my mom's and my dad's expectant eyes and shrugged.

"Have you met somebody?" she asked me in that casual way that parents do, when they're trying to hide their interest and match your apathy.

"I've met a lot of people," I told her. "New school year, new classmates."

"Yes," she said, her tone dripping impatience. "But I meant, have you met a boy?"

"Mom," I sighed, dropping my fork into my bowl. "I don't need a _boy_ to be happy. Dad, tell her."

"Janna's doing fine without any boys in her life, honey," he said.

I loved how he always backed me up.

In all of the hours over the years that I'd thought about coming out to my parents, I always knew it would have to be sprinkled into a conversation as an afterthought, to illustrate how little of a big deal it was. It would also probably be best to do it in a public place, so if they freaked out and tried to burn me at the stake there'd at least be somebody around that might stop them. Both of them being drunk and in high spirits would be a bonus.

I glanced up at the wine glasses on the other side of the table and realized that, holy shit, this was it. The trinity had come together. Before I could second guess myself, I set down my glass of water and said, "besides, I'm more into girls."

I concentrated very, very hard on twirling spaghetti around my fork. Was it me, or had the whole restaurant gotten quieter? Several seconds had passed now. I had _assumed_ that my parents loved me too much to disown me, but doubt was beginning to creep in.

It was my father that spoke first. "Well that's great, Janna."

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. This was fine. If I was expecting a reasonable reaction out of one of them, it would have been Dad. He smiled warmly across the table, but I couldn't manage one back because there was still the issue of his wife beside him who had yet to say a word.

I chanced a look in her direction. There were tears welling up in her eyes. Oh, god. What had I done? I'd ruined her. I hadn't even considered I was announcing that her only child would not be bearing any grandchildren, and the family bloodline ended here.

She stood up. I wondered if I should reach for my steak knife, to defend myself.

Wait a minute. I ordered spaghetti. Why did they bring me a steak knife?! Had the restaurant foreseen that my mother would try to kill me tonight?

She stepped to my side of the table and held out her arms, tears giving way to a smile. I had no idea what was happening.

"Mom, we're in a restaurant..."

"Oh, that doesn't matter! Stand up and give your mother a hug."

Although the diners around us were very much engaged in their own meals and conversations, I couldn't help but feel spotlit as I obliged my mom's request. She wrapped me up tightly in her arms like she used to when I was a child, and for a moment I forced away my fluster and succumbed to pure love. Out of all of the outcomes I had envisioned, this may have been right at the bottom of likeliness, along with such things as a meteor striking me down, or both of my parents announcing that they were gay, too.

"Thank you for confiding in us, baby," Mom cooed into my ear.

I didn't know what to say to that. "Okay?"

"Oh," she fussed, finally letting me go. "It's just that you've always kept to yourself so much, and..." My parents shared a heartfelt glance. "Your father and I have always had our suspicions."

Another surprise. I sunk back into my chair. "What?" I whined.

"Not in a bad way," my mom assured me, taking her seat again. "You've just never shown much interest in boys. But with girls, well, there was that poster that you hung up in your room once," she said, frowning in thought.

I racked my brains, squinted, tried to picture my childhood bedroom. "That was _Princess Peach_ ," I spluttered. "She's an animated video game character!"

I didn't even _like_ Peach. I only hung up that poster because Yoshi was in the background.

"There was the girl you always used to come home from school and babble on about," my dad chimed in. "Maria."

Ah, shit. They'd known all along. "Well, great. I'm glad you guys knew which way I swung before I did. Now can you please keep this quiet? I haven't told _anyone._ "

"Of course, baby," my mom said. "We do this at your pace."

I rolled my eyes, but stopped myself from saying something like _there's no "we" about this_. Secretly, I liked how she'd already assumed us as a team.

"So... are there any _girls?_ "

"Mom!"

"What? I'm taking an interest in my daughter's life, is that such a crime?"

"I think she's had enough interrogation for one night, honey," my dad said.

"There's nobody, of any gender, that I am seeing or hoping to see," I lied.

And that was that, aside from the one other stupid thing my mom decided to say that evening: "You know, your uncle Ryan is gay."

I let a forkful of spaghetti fall back to my plate. _"What?"_

She nodded.

"He's married to Aunt Jasmine!"

"He's a _florist._ "

"Jesus Christ, Mom."

On Monday morning's ride to school, Jackie was unusually quiet. She didn't hang around at our lockers before class, just waved to me as she walked away. Of course, the first half of my day was spent worrying that flirting with her on Friday night had crossed a line.

Ten minutes into lunch, she hadn't shown up at our table. I got halfway through one carrot stick before deciding I wasn't hungry and sweeping my food back into my bag. She wasn't out on the steps with the other skaters. I realized, when all of their eyes fell on me, that the school had not in fact installed blackout glass in all of the windows, and they could quite easily see me gawking at them. I shook my head at myself and walked away.

Jackie was sitting on a low brick wall opposite a row of lockers, around the back of the building. Her eyes twinkled in the sunlight when she looked up at me and smiled, which gave me the go-ahead to step out of the shade and join her.

"Hey."

"Hey," she said. "Sorry, I stayed out here 'cause I wasn't very hungry."

"That's cool," I told her, kicking off my shoes and letting my feet bask in warmth with the rest of my body. "Everything okay?"

She sighed. "My dad dropped a bombshell on us over the weekend."

I looked up into her eyes again. God, her eyes. They made me weak on a good day. Right now, they warned me that I wasn't going to like what she was about to say.

"The office he works at is closing down. Which means... if he wants to keep his job, he has to move to New York."

I felt something inside of me plummet. All of my hopes and dreams, perhaps. "New York?" was all I was able to say.

"It's not definite, I mean, he's been at the company for over ten years and he doesn't like the way they're handling the whole situation, so... he might decide to tell his bosses to go shove his job up their butts. But I don't know how long we'd be able to survive just on my mom's salary."

Her mother was a part-time housekeeper. Her father was a project manager at a large tech company. The odds weren't looking great. "When is this all supposed to happen?"

"They'll be closing the office at the end of this year. I'd be gone by January."

That was three months away. I swallowed all of the obscenities in my throat. "Shit."

Whoops, one slipped out.

"Yeah. Shit."

We were silent for a moment. I tried to remember what life was like before her, but I was drawing blanks. "I'm trying to imagine what I'd do here without you," I said, a sad laugh cutting into the last syllable.

She bumped her shoulder against mine. "I don't know what I'd do without _you_. I don't know what I'd do without L.A. either. I'm built for the beach, and the sun. You know it _snows_ in New York?"

"You'd come back to visit, right?"

"Oh yeah," she said, with enough confidence to keep a flicker of hope alive. "If my dad's gonna force me to move to New York, I'm gonna force him to buy me plane tickets back here... at least every three months."

After coming out to my parents and riding a good mood all weekend, I was having trouble processing this. I knew I needed a couple of hours to sit by myself and, thankfully, my boring afternoon classes would allow it. As for the moment I was currently stuck in, I had no choice but to exit the conversation with a joke to cover up how I really felt. Well, I had a lot of other choices, actually, but I was worried that all of them would end up with me in tears.

I stood up, extended my hand to Jackie, and said, "well, it's been nice knowing you."

Her hands stayed glued to the wall. "Janna," she said, with a disapproving look that screamed _I can see right through you._

"I'm kidding," I said, and then I didn't really know what to do with my hands, so I stuffed them in my pockets, but I was wearing a skirt so I didn't have any pockets, so I wrung them out behind my back instead. It was very messy. I was very uncomfortable. "I have to get back to the cafeteria before someone steals my food," I lied. "I'll see you after school?"

"Yeah," she sighed, but I'd turned away before I could gauge her mood.

Fifth and sixth period flew by, because my mind was busy planning out how I'd convince my parents to fly me to the other end of the country every couple of months. It hadn't clicked with me just how essential Jackie had become to my life over the summer that drew us closer. She was my best friend, without a doubt, and it took the threat of losing her to distance to remind me how important she was.

As I packed my books away after the final bell, somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I spun around to find my blonde-haired friend of old, Star Butterfly.

"Are you okay?" she whispered.

"Yeah. Are you?"

She hesitated for a moment. I clocked Marco lingering by the door out of the corner of my eye. "That didn't sound very convincing."

"I'm fine," and I didn't really want to talk to her right now, so I walked away.

Jackie was waiting for me by my locker, loyal as always even when I was being a dick. At the sight of the sun bouncing off her hair I was awash with affection, and I was about to apologize for everything negative I'd ever said around her when she asked me, "do you mind if we take a detour today? I could do with clearing my head."

I took the helmet from her hand and nodded. She didn't want to dump me off at home as soon as possible, so that was a good sign. She rode me around the outskirts of our neighborhood, faster than I was used to, as if she was letting out her frustration with speed.

She hadn't crashed since the scar on her shoulder, I reminded myself.

"Here it comes," she announced out of the blue at a seemingly random point in our detour. I didn't know what "it" was until I peered over her shoulder and saw that we were fast approaching the edge of the world. Seriously, that's what it looked like. The road and the sidewalk just ended, dropped away into nothing.

And with a deadpan tone that told me she didn't care in the slightest that she was going to kill us both, Jackie shouted back at me, "steepest hill in Echo Creek."

"Jackie," I spluttered, a last ditch effort to reason with my murderer. "Jackie Jackie Jackie Jackie-" but it was too late. I clamped my eyes shut, wrapped my arms around her midsection, and clung on to her for life as the wind picked up, howling in my ears, as the wheels of the board thudded against cracks in the pavement, each one threatening to throw us to the concrete and permanently ruin my face.

I mentally said goodbye to my parents, farewell to my grandma and her dog, Ruffles, adios to my amigos. Sorry I died by falling in love with a maniac. I even prayed.

 _Somebody_ came through, because after twenty seconds the whooshing in my ears died down, and my body was still - as far as I could feel - upright and intact. Once the deathtrap had come to a complete stop, I dared to open my eyes. Jackie was still attached to my torso, her shoulder was supporting my chin.

"Gets the blood pumping, huh?" she said, grinning at me.

I thrusted away from her and jumped off the board, back to the safety of solid, reliable, motionless ground. " _Gets the blood pumping? Never_ do that again." I bent over somebody's front lawn, tried to decide whether I was about to throw up. I think I was being a little dramatic.

"Come on, it wasn't _so_ bad," I heard her say, and after a moment her hands were massaging my shoulders.

I glanced over at the hill, which didn't look very high _or_ steep from the distance we had been carried away from it.

"We just kicked that hill's ass, dude. Doesn't that feel great?"

A single laugh escaped from my mouth and cut through the peaceful neighborhood. Another followed it, then a third, and Jackie laughed along with me. I turned around and we shared an everything-is-going-to-be-fine kind of smile.

Then I looked up at the house looming over the front lawn we were invading. The sight of it made my heart skip a beat, though I didn't know why. Two stories, a tiled roof, concrete steps out the front, a lawn that was vacant save for a _SOLD_ sign and two teenage girls. Nothing stood out, except for the green door.

The green door. The green door I had knocked on with my little seven-year-old nerves bubbling to get into Maria Williams' birthday party.

I'm not sure what I was expecting to happen, but my feet carried me up the path to the steps. I climbed the steps, which were smaller and less dread-inducing than I remembered, and used the height to peer through one of the windows. The house was empty. But it had been here all along, just outside my neighborhood, and my childhood brain had never saved the location, or even considered that Maria was always so close by.

I heard my name called out behind me, and like a deer in the headlights I turned to find that Jackie had followed me up the path.

I wasn't superstitious. But what were the chances that Jackie's skateboard would lead me back to the place that my infatuation for girls all began?

"What's going on?" she asked me.

I didn't know what the hell was going on. I didn't know what kind of freaky higher power was controlling my life. I looked across at the _SOLD_ sign again, at the spot in the road where my dad had parked up and told me that I had to take chances.

I had to take chances.

"Janna," she said, ascending the steps to my eye level, "are you okay?"

"Will you go out with me?" I heard myself ask.

The silence as Jackie's face fell was torturous. I begged for a motorbike to blast through pumping heavy metal out of a boombox, anything to distract us from the bubble of awkwardness we'd found ourselves suspended in. Hell, I would have taken a drive-by shooting.

But then she burst the bubble with, "yeah. Okay."

I glanced up at the sky. Nope, the world wasn't ending. "Really?"

"Yeah. That sounds nice."

I felt calm. Which I knew must have been the incorrect reaction. Clearly, my body hadn't caught up to what was happening yet.

"Okay," I said.

She took me home. I don't think either of us knew what to do when we reached my house, so I mumbled something about seeing her tomorrow and hurried up the path to the safety of my front door. I climbed the stairs to my room and spent a few hours curled up in bed fretting over what I would do next. Out of all of the times I had pictured asking Jackie on a date, I'd never imagined past the point where she says _no_ and abandons me forever.

At 8:30PM, my phone buzzed, and her name popped up on the screen.

 _Did that really happen today or was I dreaming?_

My fingers hovered over the keyboard ready to magic up a witty or a cute response, but the part of my brain that controlled my personality must have shut off hours before.

 _Nope, that happened,_ I typed back.

My phone told me she was typing again. Then she stopped. Then she started again. Then she stopped. I remember thinking, _shit. She's going to tell me she changed her mind,_ but after an agonizing minute:

 _Well, it made my whole day a lot better. I'm excited_ , and she even put a little heart emoji at the end. A green one, but a heart nonetheless.

There, in my bed with my phone clutched to my chest and my toes wiggling, I think I must have been the happiest I had ever felt.


	3. Chapter 3

We arranged for our date to take place at the diner we liked just outside of town. I devised a three-step plan for myself to ensure everything went smoothly. I even wrote it down, take a look:

 _1\. Walk her to the diner without either of you getting killed. Treat her like she's still just a best friend and not a love interest at this point - the conversation will flow naturally if you do. If you get stuck, ask her how her grandma's cat is doing. Don't get stuck._

 _2\. At the diner, sit directly opposite her, not diagonally opposite. Order something light, because you don't want to stuff your face and become a bloated weary mess. You might have to eat a salad for the first time in your life. Something fruity for dessert, in case another miracle strikes and she wants to kiss you. If a homophobic individual suspects that you are on a date and starts hurling food at you, this is your opportunity to be a hero. Immediately shield Jackie from any incoming projectiles, reach into your back pocket for the shotgun you stole from the cop on the way here, and open fire._

 _3\. At some point on the walk home, go to hold her hand. If, when you get back to her house, she invites you inside, then great. If not, sit outside her front door and cry loudly until she lets you in._

Okay, so the list wasn't totally serious, but it did contain some morsels of wisdom.

Now, can you guess at which step it all went to shit?

If you guessed 1, 2, or 3, then you're _wrong_ , because it all went to shit before the plan had even begun.

I woke up on Wednesday morning, the dawn of our date, with a feeling in the back of my throat like there was a small animal digging around in there. I staggered into the bathroom to take my morning pee, and then sneezed fourteen times in a row - not exaggerating.

I somehow made it downstairs without my wobbly legs giving way, but I must have looked like a zombie as much as I felt like a zombie, because my mom started fussing over me before I had even sat down at the breakfast table.

"Oh, honey, you look _pale._ "

"Well I feel like a million bucks," I coughed, pouring myself a bowl of cereal.

She slapped a palm to my forehead. Declared fever. Nope, I wasn't having any of that. Not today.

"Maybe you should stay home today, Janna."

"Can't. I have a... fire drill."

"You look like you can barely stand up. And you wouldn't want to infect your classmates, now would you?"

I was about to drop a fiery sarcastic response, but - and I'll try not to be too graphic about this - I threw up over my cereal. When I was done, my mother had her arms folded and the smuggest of I-told-you-so looks on her face, which I thought was a little harsh.

I had never paired Lucky Charms with vomit before, but I got the impression that it wouldn't be as good as Lucky Charms with milk, so I threw all of that in the trash, and then retired to the couch. My mom smothered me in blankets and set up a bucket on the floor, instructing me to put every ounce of my strength into avoiding the upholstery or the carpet, then she headed to work and left me by my lonesome.

Jackie would have been waiting at the corner of my street right about now. I sighed all of my misery into the room and reached for my phone, dialed the number at the top of my recent contacts.

"Hey, dude," came her chirpy little voice that melted me inside, "where you at?"

"I'm sick," I told her. "Imprisoned in my own home."

She gasped. "Oh no. We were gonna go to Barney's."

"Yeah." I pictured myself projectile puking on my date. "I don't think that's such a good idea today."

"Aw, man. I was really looking forward to that."

"I was too. I'm really sorry."

"It's okay, s'not your fault."

"We'll go as soon as I'm better?"

"Yeah. For sure. Well, hopefully see you tomorrow?"

"Hopefully. I'll text you."

"Okay. Sending hugs your way. Feel better, Janna."

"Thanks." I hung up and sighed the rest of my misery into the room.

I watched eleven reruns of _Friends_ that day, a Jim Carrey movie about erasing people's memories that I couldn't follow at all, and a thousand and one TV commercials that didn't make me want to buy anything. By the time my parents were home from work, the couch cushions had molded to my exact proportions, which was kind of cool. And tragic.

They had made dinner reservations with a couple of friends that had recently moved back to the country, and my mom kept talking about canceling them so she could stay home and nurse her baby back to health. I told her not to worry about it. Honestly, we had been getting along great since our candid talk over the weekend, and I wasn't about to ask her to skip an evening out when I would prefer to be alone anyway.

It took a lot of convincing, but they were out the door by 7PM, and I could wallow in silence instead of listen to Mom's grave concern for my health. I switched the TV off entirely because the over-exuberant car dealer two blocks away was giving me a migraine with all of his shouting into the camera. I sprawled out on the couch and tried to lose myself in a book, but my mind kept drifting to thoughts of Jackie and how I would have been sitting opposite her in a booth right now if it weren't for dumb luck.

My phone vibrated, my heart jumped, but it was just an email asking if I'd considered giving blood. I deleted it, then realized the only people that had contacted me all day were the computers churning out crap to the mailing lists I was too lazy to unsubscribe from, and that put me in a bad mood.

So when the doorbell rang halfway through running my bath, it took all of my energy not to scream. It would most likely be one of those serial cold-callers that waited until the entire city was settled into their homes for the evening before striking, come to sell me something I didn't need. They rang a second time. Even with the TV off and my phone downstairs, I couldn't escape advertising. I gritted my teeth, knelt perfectly still by the edge of the tub, as if my lack of motion would repel them away.

But they rang a third time, so I shut off the faucets and hobbled downstairs, mentally preparing what I would say to this persistent son of a bitch, something nasty, something that would really get under their skin.

Jackie watched me open the door with my best scowl. "Hey," she said. "What are you doing out of bed?"

I slammed the door. What. The. Fuck. She was here. _Here._ And I looked like...

I checked the mirror in the hallway.

I looked like the disfigured lovechild of a rat and a warthog. My hands flew to my hair, frantically combed through and flattened it down to some semblance of normal. I inspected the pajamas I had been wearing since rolling out of bed this morning. They were pink with white polka dots - nothing too lame. I found zero splotches of food or snot, so I hesitantly opened the front door a second time to a very confused Jackie.

"Where are your parents?" was the first thing she asked.

"They went out."

"They went _out?_ And left you here by yourself?"

"I told them to."

She frowned. I noticed a grocery bag dangling from her hand. "Well you're going to have to let me in, then."

I had so many objections. But I also loved her, and wanted every minute of my life to be spent gaping at her beautiful face. I stepped aside.

Jackie walked through the hallway to the living room, and stopped at the sickness station that was my couch. She scanned over the unflattering mess, complete with puke bucket which thankfully hadn't been used, an overflowing volcano of tissues, and a general aura of loneliness. I was about to apologize for what she was looking at, but I didn't want to open my mouth because I couldn't remember if I'd brushed my teeth that morning.

I backed up toward the staircase and said, "I was just running a bath, so I'm gonna go take it real quick."

She turned around, smiled. "Okay."

"Um," I murmured. It still wasn't at all clear why she was here, or why I let her in, or how I should have been treating my guest or the situation in general. "Be right back."

I scrubbed away the layers of gross I'd accumulated from spending all day sweating under blankets, drained the bath, then brushed my teeth until my gums bled. In my bedroom, I rifled through my drawers, picked out a red t-shirt, paired it with black leggings and a denim skirt. Apart from my nose being red from the day's onslaught of tissues, I didn't look half bad.

Jackie was in my kitchen, cooking something on the stove. She didn't hear me enter over the extractor fan.

"What are you doing?" I asked, because nobody had come to my house and started cooking their dinner unannounced before.

She jumped. "What are _you_ doing? Go sit down."

I lingered in the doorway. My mother had left and returned in a fifteen year old's body.

She looked over her shoulder again. "You're still here? Go. Sit," she instructed, pointing a wooden spoon in my direction.

As if under a spell, my feet lugged my body back to the couch. I sat there with my knees up, rubbing my hands together, my nerves flummoxed that there was a pretty girl in my kitchen cooking me food. I listened to the clang of spoon against saucepan, to chinaware against counter, to silence when the extractor fan clicked off. Jackie reappeared in my living room carrying two bowls, and towered over me with one held out to take. I ignored it and took the opportunity to revel in her closeness for a second.

"Careful, it's hot," she said, and I finally took the bowl by the rim and peered into a thick red liquid. Through my blocked nose, I picked up the faintest scent of tomato.

Jackie sat at the opposite end of the couch, worlds away. Much too far for my comfort, much too close if she didn't want to catch anything. She reached for the TV remote.

Fucking _Friends_ was on again. Had nothing else worthy of television been released since 2004?

"I was sitting around at home," Jackie said, interrupting Rachel whining about something, "wishing I was tucked into a booth at Barney's, and I thought, why shouldn't our first date be tonight?"

I plucked a damp tissue from the gap between the couch cushions and chucked it to the floor. "This isn't exactly what I had planned."

"Well plans are made to be broken, right?"

Honestly, I was ecstatic that she wanted to see me so badly. But I couldn't shake the thought that by the time she left my snotty quarantine, whatever minor attraction I possessed to convince her to date me in the first place would be gone. I quietly sipped my soup and kept my eyes fixed on _Friends._

We came to a point where both of our bowls were empty and placed on the coffee table. I clasped my sweaty palms between my knees and considered whether I should say anything, because the silent treatment was only really an acceptable first date strategy for a mute.

"Soup was nice," was what the wheel of boring non-sequiturs in my head landed on.

"It was a out of a can," Jackie said. "Hey, you want some ice cream?"

"Um, I don't think we have any."

"I brought some here, it's in the freezer," she said, jumping to her feet. Okay, I supposed I was eating ice cream.

Sure enough, she returned with a tub of triple chocolate and sat in the center of the couch, within arms' reach. She passed me a spoon. I was acutely aware that I kept gawking at her like a caveman discovering fire, because I had never felt so cared for by anybody outside of my family.

And then she said, "you can cuddle up if you'd like."

Goosebumps pricked my arms. "You'll get sick."

She shrugged. "I'm already in the quarantine. Also, I don't really care."

I failed to fight the sickeningly sweet smile spreading across my face, and scooted over until our hips touched. It was just like sitting in bed on our horror marathon, except Jackie wrapped her arm around my shoulder and made it ten times better. I sunk into her side, felt the warmth of her body against my bare arm.

We sat together taking turns to dig into the ice cream for the best part of two hours. I kept wondering what was going to give, what disaster was about to strike to level out the sensational luck that had led me to this situation.

I think I was close to falling asleep on her shoulder when she nudged me gently and asked when my parents would be home. I told her I didn't know, and she suggested it might be time for her to leave. My brain had a momentary lapse of reason and told me to claw at her shirt until she sat back down, but I suppressed it.

We treaded carefully through the darkness of the house and outside to the porch, where I gulped down some fresh air and briefly reveled in the feeling of clear sinuses. I leant on the doorframe, Jackie turned and smiled.

"I would kiss you," she said, which made my heart lurch because I had forgotten that was even a possibility now, "but then I would _definitely_ get sick. So how about I save that for our second date this weekend?"

I knew that this was the moment to give the perfect, flirtatious response that would make her fall crazy hard in love with me. "Okay," I said.

She tiptoed, pecked my forehead, and vanished into the night before I had a chance to thank her for looking after me, or for being an unbreakable beacon of positivity, or for making it that much easier for me to get out of bed in the mornings.

I took the rest of the week off school, because I fell into one of those lazy slumps where just the thought of doing anything outside of your house makes you groan. The upside to doing so was that by Saturday afternoon I was refreshed and ready to face the world again, my nostrils clear and my body back to normal temperatures.

I was to meet Jackie at Barney's diner at 2PM - her parents were taking her shopping in the morning and dropping her off on their way home. I threw on some shorts, a white tee, blue cardigan, and stood in front of the mirror trying to decide whether I would wear a beanie or not. I opted for a red one. Then, I took a long hard look at myself. Something was missing.

Make-up? Girls my age tended to wear make-up. Though fully aware I wouldn't know what to do with what, I had a brief rummage around in my mom's make-up bag behind the sink, until I spotted her peering around the doorframe. I pivoted and held my hands behind my back.

"Going somewhere?" she said, almost more of a statement than a question.

"Just... out."

She folded her arms. I didn't like the patronizing amusement on her face. "To see somebody?"

I turned back to the mirror, pretended her presence didn't bother me.

"Jackie, perhaps?"

"She's just a friend, mom," I told her, though I was starting to worry that I had been an open book my entire life and was just beginning to notice it myself.

"Okay. I've never seen you put on make-up for a friend, though."

"Well, I didn't put any on," I said, throwing the make-up bag to the back of the cupboard.

"And you shouldn't, baby. Because you're naturally beautiful," she cooed, appearing over my shoulder and admiring my reflection. "I don't know about the beanie though - why don't you want to show off your locks?"

I left my house at a quarter past one, beanie-less. It took a half hour to walk to Barney's at my usual pace, but I forced myself to walk slower so I wouldn't be dripping with sweat by the time I walked through the door. I was a lot less nervous than I expected to be, probably because Jackie had seen me at my rock bottom on Wednesday and still somehow deemed me a dateable human being.

I was still sat on the curb of the parking lot at 2:15, periodically checking my phone to a fresh wave of disappointment. If I were waiting on anybody else, the thought that my date had bailed would be creeping up on me, but Jackie wasn't like that.

And sure enough, her parents' car pulled up a few feet away from me at 2:17. I was about to wave at them both, because they were pretty decent folks, but when Jackie stepped out and yelled into the vehicle I clocked that I was walking towards some kind of domestic feud. I watched in stupor as her dad yelled from the driver seat over her mom, who sat with her eyes fixed ahead like she had emotionally checked out for the day. There were a few inaudible exchanges of what I assumed were unpleasantries, and then Jackie slammed the car door shut, putting an end to the screaming match.

I swear, it was straight out of an action movie, the way her dad sped off back to the highway with the tires screeching. Jackie brushed off her shirt as she approached me, and as if I hadn't just witnessed the entire spectacle, she sung, "hey, Janna."

She slipped past me, towards the diner's entrance. "Uh, hey," I managed, trailing behind her. I went to open the door for her, but she had already opened it, so I sort of hovered in the doorway pressed up against her with my arm outstretched towards nothing. Well, so far, so fucking good. Maybe if I ran after her parents they would drive me home.

I was, to say the least, a little thrown off by what had just transpired, so I was glad that Jackie took the lead in requesting a booth for two. I wandered along behind her and the waitress like a lamb and sunk into the cushioned seats, trying to make eye contact with Jackie but finding her already invested in the menu.

"I'll be back for y'all in a minute," our waitress said, with a Southern twang that I found adorable.

 _Jesus,_ I thought. _You're on a date with your dream girl. Cool it._

I couldn't stay quiet about it any longer, so I leant across the table and whispered, "what was all that about?"

"Ugh. Just my dad being irrational."

"Oh, yeah. I know how that feels," I said, before shaking my head at my menu because I didn't know how that felt at all. "What was he saying?"

A milkshake sounded good, but so did a Dr Pepper. As for food, Barney's full rack of barbecue ribs were always great. I didn't know if Barney cooked them himself. In fact, I didn't know who the fuck Barney even was. Also, Jackie was crying.

I looked up. Jackie was crying. I felt like I had stepped into a parallel universe where the dating game was cranked up to expert mode. Was it something I said?

"Hey," I said, letting the caring instincts I didn't know I possessed take over. I discreetly slinked into her side of the booth and brought a hand to her shoulder. "Hey, hey. What's wrong?"

"God, I'm sorry," she said, sniffling loudly. "This is so dumb."

"It's okay. Tell me what's going on. Is it your dad?"

Oh _shit_ , what if her dad was a devout anti-gay Catholic and his daughter just told him she was going on a date with a girl?

"I don't know what happened," Jackie told me. "My mom was eating this bagel with cream cheese in the car and my dad told her the bagels in New York City would be 'out of this world,' and then she said, 'that's if I decide to go with you.'" She hiccuped. "And my dad just _lost_ it, and so did she. She told him she didn't know if she wanted to drop her life here in L.A., and he accused her of tearing the family apart. It was like I'd been thrown into a nightmare, Janna."

The southern girl returned with a notepad and pen, one foot towards the table and one foot back like she wasn't sure what she was walking into. I asked her quietly, "can we have a moment?" She nodded politely and backed away.

"My dad was pressing me to say who I would stay with if he moved to New York and Mom stayed in L.A., and I was so taken aback, I- I told him the truth, I said if I had the choice I would stay here because I'm already a year through high school and I wouldn't want to transfer. He just freaked out, like he couldn't believe it."

I frowned. "Well that's an extremely unfair question to ask you."

"Right? That's what I told him. I mean, I've always been closer with my dad than I have with my mom, but it's like he had already assumed I would pack up everything and follow him anywhere. And I don't know if I want to. I don't know if I can."

"Maybe he's just reacting badly to the stress. It's no excuse for taking it out on you, but if he's at risk of losing his job, that sort of stress makes you act differently."

"Yeah, I know that's probably it, I'm just... I think I was just shocked." The tears had stopped, and she exhaled heavily. "Is anybody looking at us?"

I popped my head up meerkat-style and scanned our surroundings. "Only the entire restaurant," I told her.

She let out a wet chuckle, which made me smile. "God, I'm sorry. What a way to start a date."

"It's fine," I said, but I didn't feel fine. I know it was selfish, but I was rooting for Jackie's parents splitting up just so I wouldn't lose her. I didn't want to think about her departure at all, because thinking about it made me gloomy, and if we only had three months together before she had to jet, I didn't want her lasting memory of me to be gloomy. "You're gonna be fine, you know. No matter what happens. You're the strongest person I know."

She looked at me for a second in disbelief, and to tell you the truth, I couldn't believe I had said something so endearing either. Maybe you could draw the conclusion that Jackie brought out the best in me. Then she smiled, squeezed my hand, and said, "thank you, Janna."

I moved back to the other side of the booth. When the waitress returned, I asked her for a couple more napkins to replace the balled up ones soaked in tears, and having had no time to look at the menu, our choices of food were haphazard.

But we ate all of it, and our conversation never strayed to New York City or our parents or our impending doom. Instead, I explained a very condensed version of the rules of _Dungeons & Dragons, _she told me all about a spider she had befriended in her bedroom. We talked about tampons for a bit. You know, usual second date stuff.

Back out on the street, Jackie said that she didn't want to go home yet, felt that it was best to give her parents a few hours to cool down. Being broke fifteen-year-olds, we didn't have enough money for anything fun in the world, so we decided to meander back to my house.

About halfway there, I remembered the little slip of note paper I had thrown away that morning, and I reached for Jackie's hand, which gave my own a warm welcome.

My parents were in the living room, watching football. Normally, my dad would call out the score to me and the last couple minutes of the action in a never-ending effort to convert me to a Broncos fan, a team he chose to root seemingly at random when he first came to the US. But seeing I had company, my parents greeted Jackie and kept quiet about whatever was happening on screen.

Fearing my assumption that my parents had no understanding of how to act to their newly-out daughter and the first girl she had brought home, I hurried Jackie upstairs to the safety of my bedroom, where we stayed for hours. We continued the horror movie marathon that we had skipped the day before, accepted the box of pizza that my mom showed up at my door with, only managing a couple of slices each after our gluttonous lunch, and then in a burst of curiosity of unknown origin, Jackie started riffling through my chest of drawers and closet.

I spun in my desk chair and listened to her oohing and aahing about various trinkets I had stashed away in my closet throughout my childhood. When she went quiet for a moment, I glanced over and saw her holding up a metal detector.

"What's this?"

"Ghost-hunting gear," I told her.

She laughed. "Are you serious?"

"Very."

Her grin faltered. "Shut up."

I frowned, gestured to my bookshelf. "You see the rows and rows of books I own about the occult and the paranormal? Of _course_ I have a ghost-hunting kit."

She scrunched up her face, eyeing the device carefully like it might explode in her hands. "How does it work?"

"Ghosts emit pheromones," I said out of my ass. "Just because we can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. You turn that thing on and it beeps if it finds any pheromones - it's very simple."

"How does it know the difference between ghost pheromones and human pheromones?"

"It has a thermometer. We give off body heat, ghosts do not. So if you hold it over yourself, it won't beep. If you hold it out in front of you and it picks up pheromones but it feels no body heat, it knows there's a ghost."

She set the metal detector back against the wall. "And... have you ever found anything?"

"Nope. Never. Ghosts are pretty rare."

Jackie looked terrified. I was struggling not to laugh.

I said, "you, uh, wanna go on a ghost hunt?"


	4. Chapter 4

We waited until after dark. I emptied my backpack of textbooks and a mummified sandwich that I hadn't eaten on Tuesday. I took the metal detector from Jackie so she didn't switch it on and ruin my joke before it even had a chance to get underway.

I should point out that it was one of those children's metal detectors, the kind that only lights up and beeps when it finds something, and also the kind that could probably pick you up a penny or two if they were buried under half an inch of sand. I was fairly confident that it would not beep at anything if we walked around the woods pointing it towards the ground.

"Flashlights," I told her, "there should be two of them in there somewhere."

I listened to her rummage around in the closet while I silently took off my shoes and slipped them under the bed. Jackie handed me two flashlights, one by one, which I stashed in the backpack.

"Spare batteries," pointing to the drawer in my desk. "Don't wanna run out of juice in either of these puppies," even though we had our phones. Jackie seemed too nervous to question any of what I was saying.

I was trying to make it look like I was a seasoned ghostbuster, but I was struggling to come up with what else a ghostbuster would need. My eyes flicked up to the bookshelf. " _The Poltergeist Handbook._ Top shelf."

My grin was getting harder to suppress as Jackie scanned the back cover, wincing at the photograph of a woman screaming directly into the camera. "Jeez. That isn't creepy at all," she said, dropping the book in my bag.

"That's what you'll look like when you hear this thing start beeping," I said, flicking the metal detector on for a second to check that it still worked.

I glanced down at Jackie's folded bare arms, then handed her my favorite blue hoodie from the closet. With any luck, she would leave her flowery scent sewn into the lining and when she left, I would always have the hoodie to remember her by. "You should take this. It might be cold."

My parents were still glued to the couch when we reached the bottom of the stairs. "Oh, are you two heading out?" came my mom's voice as I opened the front door. Annoyingly, there was no way out of the house other than through the living room, so both of the 'rents had noticed the metal detector and were now surely mentally questioning where they had gone wrong.

"We're going on a ghost hunt," I told them, which was met with appropriately blank expressions. "Oh," I added, tapping Jackie's shoulder. "I left my shoes upstairs, give me a sec."

I rested my bag and the metal detector against the wall, then bounded up the stairs. I grabbed the pot of change on my desk, removed three quarters, and placed one in each of my shoes. I stashed the one I had left in my pocket, and as Jackie slinked through the front door after some awkward goodbyes, I transferred it to her back pocket without her noticing.

We hit the edge of the woods by 8:30PM, the start of a trail I had walked before when we had looked after our neighbor's dog for a week.

"Now," I told Jackie, "whatever you do, don't get scared. Just as this can detect ghosts, ghosts can detect your fear pheromones, and they love that shit."

She looked to the side, away from the orange glow of street lamps and into a black void. "Are you for real?"

"Jackie. You know how seriously I take this stuff."

"And what do we do if we find a ghost?"

"Well, that would be the most exciting thing that's happened since you agreed to go out with me."

Failing to suppress a grin, she latched onto my side and we stepped into the darkness, arm in arm.

Jackie maintained a beam of light ahead of us while I swung the detector back and forth like I had any idea what I was doing. Listening to only the sound of our own breathing and our feet crunching leaves, I spaced out for a minute and started to believe in my own fabrication. What if we _did_ find a ghost out here?

You know when you hatch a great idea, but then a few steps into your great idea you start to question how you were dumb enough to come up with it in the first place? I was heading towards that sort of mentality, so I decided - after Jackie got startled by a bush rustling and a bird flying out of it - that I would strike while her guard was down and get this joke over with, before I got over it.

That happened to be when we came across a clearing, and a half-moon faintly illuminated the trail ahead of us. She sighed in relief as the darkness spat us out, so I drew the metal detector closer to my left shoe until it beeped.

It was _loud,_ much louder than I remembered, and I jumped even though I was the one in control of the thing. We both froze in place, and once the echo of the single beep had fully faded out, Jackie whispered, "what does that mean?"

I held the detector out in front of us, waved it around a bit. "I don't know. That's never happened before." I crept forward, leaving Jackie behind me.

"Janna."

"Hold on," I said, waving it over my foot and releasing a longer beep into the silence. I feigned shock again.

"Turn it off," Jackie urged.

"Turning this off isn't going to make it go away."

Her eyes ballooned. "What is _it,_ exactly? Is there a freaking ghost? Right here?"

"Shh. Do you hear that?" Dead silence, of course.

"What?"

For the climax of the joke, I swung the detector around until it pointed right at her and a continuous beep resounded. You would have thought that the fear on her face would have ruined the date then and there, and honestly, I'll never know how it didn't.

"Janna," she spluttered. "Janna, what do I do?"

"Don't move."

"Don't move?! Fuck that!" She darted past me, dropping the flashlight at my feet, and I grew a little concerned that I had drove her to both insanity and a life as a forest-dwelling hermit, until I heard her trip over something and thud onto the ground.

Ah, there it was. The point at which I felt the all-too-familiar guilt of taking a joke too far. I picked up her flashlight and bounded over to where I had heard her fall - sure enough, she was pushing herself up out of the dry dirt.

"Are you alright?"

"Is it gone?" she pleaded, standing up and using me for balance. "Tell me it's gone."

"It's gone." I gave her a moment to calm down, considered taking the lie to the grave. "The funny thing is, it was never here in the first place," I added, a sly grin naturally coming over me because I was basically Satan.

"What?"

"It's a metal detector," I said, holding up the ghost-hunting rod.

It took a moment to register, but once it did, she shoved me in the chest, and I thought that surely our relationship had come to an end. "You _ass,_ " she hissed, stepping back and pacing in circles.

I wanted to offer my condolences, or tell her I'd walk her back to the safety of civilization where we could part ways for good, but all I could do was chuckle. I couldn't _not_ laugh. Her reaction was perfect, and disappearing into the dark with her arms flailing? Cherry on top.

But I think I got the first concrete piece of evidence that we were made for each other when she started laughing along with me.

"Your face," I said. "You should have seen your face."

"Shut up, you... fuck. God damn, Janna." She gestured wildly to the wasteland around us. "You brought me all the way out here just for one joke?"

"Worth it."

"No, not worth it," she said, and although she went to shove me again she chose to pull on my cardigan instead.

Without even thinking about it, my hands landed on her waist. Her shallow breaths warmed my face. "You know I wouldn't let a ghost hurt you," I told her.

"Oh yeah? Why's that?"

"'Cause I like you."

Then she kissed me. I was still so drunk on euphoria from the joke landing that she caught me off guard. Her hands landed on my hips, my eyes fluttered closed. I found the small of her back and drew her closer. It was everything I had dreamed of, down to the smile I could barely make out in the dark as we parted.

On our walk back to civilization, Jackie read aloud a text from her brother, half-coherently telling her to come and meet him at a party somewhere.

"That's only ten minutes away," she said. "Should we go?"

That question scared me. Her brother was in _college_. I had heard things about college parties, and those things were not glamorous. But, I don't know, Jackie seemed pretty excited, and she was hard to say no to.

So we ended up in a quiet cul-de-sac save for the house at the end, which was pumping out a bassy thud for the whole street to listen to. It was also the brightest building as far as my eyes could see, like a beacon for the bored students of the town.

"Are they gonna let us in?" I asked as we drew closer, because my nerves wanted Jackie to say no so we could turn around. I thought about Maria Williams' birthday party, but my dad's wisdom didn't really apply here. There would not be cake inside, or any games I felt comfortable playing.

Jackie gestured to the ajar front door, spilling light and casting our shadows over the lawn. "I guess so," she said, but she seemed as hesitant to push it open as I would have been.

In the end, a couple of girls emerged from the shadows and came up the path behind us. "You guys going in?" one of them asked - not in a rude way, more of a what-are-you-doing kind of way. Jackie finally let herself in, I followed closely, and the other girl behind us asked if we were freshmen.

"Sophomores," I responded automatically. I felt a little stupid when I remembered this wasn't a standard high school party with nachos and Coca-Cola, this was college. The real deal. And, shit, I was way too young to be here.

There was a guy with a shoulder-length beard rather vigorously making out with a brunette girl, pressed up against the side of the staircase. Their hands were all over each other and under one another's clothes. There were enough beer bottles scattered around to overflow a landfill. The room to my right was so packed with dancers that I doubted my chances of getting through the door, the room to my left featured a crowd gathered around a table, and- yep, they were snorting something. They were snorting something. Oh, dear god. My mom would be horrified if she knew I was even standing here witnessing it.

Somebody grabbed my hand and I panicked internally, but it was only Jackie.

"Let's go find Chris," she shouted in my ear.

Chris. Yeah, Chris, her brother. I hadn't met him before, but he was related to Jackie, so he must have been cool. And not a crackhead.

She led me along the narrow hallway. I pushed up against the wall to give the touchy-feely couple a wide berth. I could feel pairs of eyes flick towards us as we passed, but I decided making contact with any of them was a bad idea. As long as an ominous chant of "fresh meat" didn't start up around us, I thought we would be okay.

We found Chris at the far end of the kitchen. Jackie tapped him on the shoulder and he spun around and beamed at us. I wasn't so sure about the crackhead part after that.

"L'il sis!" He wrapped her up in a hug and our hands separated. "What are you doing here?"

"You invited me here, remember?"

"Right, right. I did?"

"Yes! Like, an hour ago?"

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding. It's so good to see you! And who's this?" His hair was blonde, but more the color of a yellow labrador than Jackie's sandy beaches.

"This is my friend Janna."

"Oh, this is _Janna_. I've heard a lot about you," he said, shaking my hand.

"Likewise," I told him.

Chris introduced us to his circle of friends, some of whose names I did not catch over the music. Actually, I missed most of the conversation. A couple of times a question appeared to be directed at me, and I chose to nod or shake my head purely at random and got a laugh both times, so I didn't know what to think of that.

Chris disappeared for a moment and came back with two red cups of liquid, claimed it was rum and Coke. It tasted like cough medicine and chili powder. But, my height and the total lack of comfort on my face already made me stand out - I didn't want to also be the only person here without a drink in their hand.

Perhaps a few years down the line, I would be capable of enjoying a situation like this. But I couldn't understand why Jackie's brother had given two fifteen-year-olds strong alcoholic drinks, I couldn't involve myself in any of the conversations these college students were having, and I was anchored to Jackie's side like a puppy. No independence. She kept pulling her brother aside and telling him about her little dispute earlier with her parents. He was sympathetic, but having moved away from home a couple of years before, their parents' relocation had less of an effect on him.

When my blood felt a little warmer, and my thoughts felt a little slower, I deduced that the alcohol was taking some kind of effect. I started to care less about being trapped in a stranger's house, or my eardrums being tortured. I supposed when it came to being chucked into an unfamiliar environment, drinking was like the adult equivalent to my dad giving me a pep talk in the car. I didn't have the courage to move from the one tile of kitchen floor I had welded myself to, though.

I checked my phone; two missed calls from my mom. I started writing a text to tell her I was at Jackie's house and I would be home late. Either the little keyboard buttons had gotten smaller or my thumbs were bigger, because typing was a lot harder than usual.

I sent the message after correcting three typos. Didn't want to give anything away. Somebody took me by the arm and led me elsewhere again, but I didn't bother looking up to check who it was. I could smell her perfume.

"Where are we going?" I shouted, stashing my phone in my pocket.

Jackie didn't answer. I watched the back of her head, gazed at the pretty blue highlight in her hair. We weaved in and out of crowds. They had either grown accustomed to our presence or I wasn't noticing their stares anymore. Don't ask me how, but we found ourselves in the house's garage. The light was already on but it was empty. There was a rush of cool air and an equally satisfying absence of noise. I breathed in deep, let out a sigh.

"Crazy in there," I said, as Jackie shut the door behind us. "What are we doing out here?"

"Thought you could use a break."

"Me? I'm fine."

"You didn't look like you were particularly enjoying it. To tell you the truth, I wasn't either. I don't know _how_ my brother does this week after week."

"It's not so bad," I lied. "I just... prefer spending time with you. Alone."

My turn to make a move, I decided. Or, the rum decided. I found her hands with my own, took a step into her personal space, and gently kissed her lips. In the woods, it had lasted a few seconds. Now, we clung to each other like the two girls who would soon be separated by two thousand miles. Our lips parted and rejoined, over and over, kisses becoming more and more fervent until I had trouble remembering to breathe. Jackie's back hit a wall but we kept on going, our fingers exploring the depths of each other's hair, our hands circling each other's waists with a reluctance to move any further.

She was the first to find bare skin. She slipped her hands under my shirt. The contact was cold but my body lurched into hers because she apparently knew exactly what it wanted. I lost track of time, but we must have stayed like that for five minutes before her phone interrupted us for the second time that night.

I pulled back, a tingling sensation on my lips and tongue, and our hot breaths filled the air between us. Her diamond eyes gazed back at me. Maybe she was vowing to never kiss a boy again, like I was. No boy could ever have compared to that.

Jackie eventually broke our trance and answered the phone. "Hey."

 _Hang up,_ I mouthed, and she grinned and slapped my shoulder.

"Yeah, I'm actually with Chris. I thought I'd come and visit. Janna's here too."

I'll admit I was being a bit of a menace, but I kept kissing her cheeks and the corners of her mouth while she talked. It was addictive. _She_ was addictive.

"It's fine, Dad. Really. I know you've been under a lot of pressure."

 _Shh,_ Jackie hissed at me, after a particularly drawn out smooch near the phone's receiver.

"It's okay, we'll walk. I'll be home in thirty. Alright. Love you too." She put her phone away and squeezed my cheek. "My dad said sorry for ignoring you earlier in the parking lot."

"Tell him it's okay because his daughter is an angel."

She tilted her head. "Are you drunk?"

"Drunk on love," I purred.

"Okay, I'm gonna walk you home."

We linked hands and escaped from the party I had never really been a part of, or wanted to be. And yet, it was up there with the best nights of my life. We didn't talk much. We never did, walking around, or on her skateboard. I liked it. The silence meant we were satisfied.

Jackie walked me right up to my front door. Under the broken lamp of the porch, we kissed in the privacy of darkness until a light flicked on in the house and we broke down in giggles.

"I should go," she said, swinging my hands.

I pecked her lips one more time, to tide me over until whenever I next saw her. The words, "don't leave," fell out of my mouth, and from the tone of my voice we both knew I wasn't talking about just this moment. I couldn't imagine a life without her.

She focused on my feet. "It's not really my decision."

I knew that. I wasn't literally asking her to disown her family and stay with me instead. I supposed I was just putting it out there - a plea to whoever may have been watching over us.

Jackie cupped my cheeks, kissed me again. Then she walked away without a word.

I could spend hours upon hours describing the following weeks we spent together, but I won't, because it's more of the same mushy shit you've just read. So, to keep it brief:

We continued skateboarding to and from school, then we would end up in either of our bedrooms. We mostly behaved how we used to as friends - we would settle into a video game or a TV show, or she'd sit cross-legged on the floor with a textbook and try to persuade me to do my homework. But there was a whole new option now - one of us could take the other by the hand, sit them down on the bed, and initiate an at-times ravenous exchange of kisses which seemed to always accelerate time itself. Sometimes I wished we would skip the formalities and get on with what really mattered - chowing down on her gorgeous face - but I was timid by nature when it came to this sort of thing. It didn't matter how long I had with Jackie, I would always be scared I was on the cusp of screwing it all up.

Her possible departure from California and my dreamlike life continued to be the elephant in the room. I didn't want to talk about it, I didn't want to think about it, and both of us preferred to imagine it was never going to happen. But, sometimes, she'd get a text from her dad about how lovely this NYC apartment was, or how the local school had a skatepark she could use in her lunch break, and the fat old elephant would trudge on over and take a seat on my face.

On Halloween, we teamed up with Hope and some other girls from school on our costume ideas: train-wreck Disney princesses. I bought a Snow White costume on Amazon and gleefully tore parts of it off, cut slits in it with a knife, burned a hole in it with a cigarette lighter I borrowed from a random senior that I think had the hots for me (would not recommend - whole thing nearly went up in flames). On the night, I ruffled my hair up to resemble Einstein without the 'stache, kept it in place with my mom's hairspray, and loosely affixed a red bow. Then, I smeared some cocaine (flour) around my face, and my transformation was complete. I was "Snow Whiter," I told the girls.

Jackie braided her hair and wore an Elsa dress, also from Amazon, then padded out her bra with socks until she was Boob-job Elsa. To accompany it, at several points in the night she broke out into a rendition of _Let It Go_ she called _Let 'Em Grow._

Hope went one step further and somehow convinced several boys from school to wear various monster costumes, threw on a yellow dress she already owned, and showed up to my house, with the guys flanking her, calling herself "Belle the Shameless Slut."

Our parents massively disapproved, but when we all showed up to the party our peers had the opposite reaction.

Now, I don't know if you've ever seen Snow White making out with Elsa (there's some pretty raunchy stuff in the darkest recesses of the internet), but if you happened to stumble into the closet on the second floor of Alfonzo Dolittle's house on Halloween night, that's what you would have found.

We kept our relationship a secret to everyone. It was never agreed upon, I don't think, just an unspoken rule. This meant no hand-holding in the halls, no kisses between class, none of the other things that straight couples felt the need to flaunt in front of everyone at any given opportunity (ahem, Star and Marco).

But I'm fairly sure my mom and dad figured it out. On the days that Jackie wasn't lounging around in my bedroom, I was most likely to be found in hers. And, because my parents are unquestionably the best parents in the world, they never poked the bear. I was gay, I was with a girl, and they didn't pry because they were happy that I was happy. I couldn't have asked for more from them, to be honest.

In summary, everything was great and terrible at the same time. At nights, after lying down in my bed, I had a five-minute window of opportunity to fall asleep before my brain started running through all of the ways that this thing with Jackie could come to an end, and I would be awake for hours.

And by the end of November, it was beginning to look like our story wouldn't have a happy ending after all.

* * *

 _ **A/N:** Next week is the last chapter. Thank you for reading this far!_


	5. Chapter 5

Every now and then, the school faculty would organize an evening dance for students to "blow off steam," each with a theme and target audience chosen seemingly at random. This year, the _Sophomore Snow Ball_ was fast approaching. I usually avoided these things like the plague, because spending time in school outside of school hours was a bizarre concept, I couldn't dance, and I didn't own any dance-appropriate clothes save for a beaten-up Snow White dress.

But now, I had somebody to go with. And that person was such a delight to be around that she would most likely take my mind off of all the other stuff.

At the end of every day in the final week of November, a couple of girls from some party-planning club set up a stall by the main exit selling fake roses that had been painted silver and splashed with glitter. It was customary to purchase one of these roses to give to the person you would like to bring to the dance. I noticed, spending a week watching from afar, that it was more common for boys to buy them for girls, but I did see a few ladies go up and break the trend, so I at least wouldn't be screaming _I AM A LESBIAN_ just by approaching the stand. Although, if I was taking a girl to the dance, the time for that would soon come anyway.

On Friday, I rushed out of class and collected a rose before Jackie could show up at my locker.

"And I have to pay?" I asked the chipper blonde girl behind the stall.

"It's two dollars."

"What does that money go towards?"

"It goes directly to the party-planning club, so it will be used to purchase things for any future parties. Decorations, food, stuff like that."

"What if I don't care about any of that?"

She looked at me blankly.

"Okay, fine."

I handed over two dollar bills, stashed the paper rose in my bag and saved it for when I would see Jackie on Saturday night.

She knocked on my door at around 5, and we walked up to one of our favorite spots in the hills surrounding Echo Creek, a viewpoint overlooking the town. The wooden bench up there was hard on the ass, but the view was easy on the eyes, particularly at twilight as the town's network of lights gradually flickered to life.

Jackie had had a hard week matching her dad's enthusiasm while searching online for apartments in the Big Apple, which she told me all about as we huddled together on the bench. I got a fuzzy feeling inside knowing I could cheer her up with the rose.

I was mistaken.

I pulled it from the bottom of my backpack, admittedly slightly worse for wear, and handed it out to her. She took it and straightened out the crinkled petals with a tiny grin on her face.

"What's this?"

"Jackie Lynn Thomas," I said, and kissed her cheek. "You wanna go to the Snow Ball dance, or whatever?"

God, those ten seconds of nothing before she next spoke. I visibly cringe just thinking about it.

"Janna, this is really sweet. But... I don't know if it's a good idea."

My heart hammered against my chest a couple of times. I think it was trying to escape. "If what's a good idea?"

"Going to the dance. Together."

"Oh." If darkness hadn't already fallen, my pink cheeks would have been visible from miles away. I wasn't used to being embarrassed.

"I'm sorry. It's just... nobody knows about us. I haven't even begun to think through how I'm going to tell my parents, and turning up together at a dance in front of the whole school..."

"We wouldn't have to, like, act like a couple or anything. We could say we were there as friends."

"The Snow Ball is a couples' dance."

I frowned, picked at the strings of my hoodie. "Okay."

"I'm sorry," she sighed, reaching for my hand. "It's not you. I'm just having a hard time imagining how we're going to make this public when I don't even know what _this_ is."

What did she mean? It was us. Janna and Jackie. Jackie and Janna. J-squad. "Okay... what do you think it is?"

It was like I had asked her to solve world hunger, the concentration on her face. "I don't know. I don't even know what I am. What I want, or what I like. I don't know if I'm gay, or straight, or bisexual. And with this move to New York, I haven't had any time to think about it."

Her hand felt cold, all of a sudden. I withdrew mine from hers. "So... what am I to you? Some kind of experiment?"

"What? Janna, no, you're-"

"Because that's what it sounds like. If 'you don't know whether you're straight'. Am I just a stepping stone on the way to figuring that out?"

I didn't know if that was how I really felt, but I was hurting from the sort of rejection I had expected when I had asked her out in the first place. I had a feeling it was all going to catch up to me eventually. One thing I knew for sure, with tears pooling in my eyes, was that I had to leave before I humiliated myself further. I yanked my bag over my shoulder and made haste for my bedroom.

I heard Jackie huff, supposedly in disbelief, and jump up to follow me. "Janna, wait."

I didn't want to wait. I had waited years for a crush on a girl to come to fruition, and now it was looking like it would be stripped away from me like I was the butt of a cruel joke.

"Janna." She grabbed my arm, spun me around. "Where are you going?"

"Home. I don't know. Away from here, away from... whatever _this_ is."

She blew a strand of hair out of her face. I couldn't remember seeing her angry before. "Can you honestly say you know exactly how to label yourself? We're still fifteen, we're _supposed_ to still be figuring this stuff out. Not everything is so black and white, you know."

"I know that, but it's not like we've been taking this slowly, is it? We made out on our second date, we spend every afternoon together, sometimes _in bed_. I expected you to be past the I-wonder-if-I'm-still-straight phase."

"But we weren't talking about any of that. You were asking me to announce publicly that we were dating by strolling into the school dance together, and I didn't know if I was comfortable doing that."

"Yeah, but then you dropped the bombshell that I didn't mean anything to you."

"That's _obviously_ not what I was saying!"

"I know! I know."

I took a sharp breath, let the tears stream down my cheeks for a while. Jackie stood opposite me, arms folded, close enough that the darkness didn't envelop her. The space around us was devoid of sound, save for our irregular gasps for air. I heard her sniffle.

"This was going to be one of the last chances we had to see each other," I said, piercing the silence with my miserable, wet tone. "I thought it would be fun."

She looked up. Through tears, still beautiful as ever.

"It's already December. You're gonna be gone soon, and then..."

"I am going to be gone soon. And we've been avoiding talking about it."

"Well that's-"

"I know, it's my fault. I know." She kicked at the dirt, shook her head. "It's like we've been trying to rush a relationship, before I have to leave. That's why we've spent so much time together, why we've been moving so fast."

"Because we both know this won't work if we're thousands of miles apart," I finished for her. It made sense, however much I wished it didn't.

There, under a moonlit canopy, I felt the start of my first heartbreak. Neither of us explicitly said, then and there, that it was over. But it hung over our heads all the way home, a low cloud of melancholy. Jackie would leave, and one day in the distant future that cloud would evaporate, but for now, I was stuck underneath it.

We walked side by side to my house, not really connected, no longer involved. Outside the gate that separated my front yard from the street, she kissed my cheek, but neither of us uttered a word. I think part of me died up on that hilltop, and little fragments of hope for how my life would turn out spilled out of me on the walk back.

I spent the rest of the weekend in bed. My parents scolded me for it, at first, but when I only responded to any accusations of how lazy I was with a groan they quickly figured out what had happened.

"Everything sucks," I told my dad just as he was leaving my room after checking up on me on Sunday night. It was my little way of letting him know I wanted to talk.

He perched on the end of my bed, squeezed my toes like when I was a little kid. "We don't even know that she's leaving for sure, do we?"

"They put a deposit down for an apartment. I saw it on Facebook."

"Oh. Sweetheart, I know it feels like the end of the world right now, but you're still so young. There'll be plenty of other Jackies."

"How can you say that?" I snapped, sitting upright. "There won't be anyone like her. She's one of a kind."

"I know, and I really like Jackie, but there will be other girls in the future that are one of a kind, in different ways."

I plucked at the bedsheets. Thought about Maria, how I once described her as one of a kind. "That doesn't make me feel any better," I said, and collapsed back onto my pillow.

"Nothing will make you feel better, honey, not for quite some time. I've been there before, I know how it feels. The best thing you can do is focus on yourself for a while. Try and remember all of the things that make _you_ one of a kind."

"You mean like my terrible attitude and my weird obsession with clowns?"

"Exactly."

An involuntary chuckle escaped my mouth. It might have been the first sign that I was going to be okay.

I got the Dungeons & Dragons party back together, because spending time in an imaginary kingdom where I didn't reek of loneliness was about the best plan I could think of for recovery. The party consisted of myself and two of Marco's friends. We didn't invite Marco back, because screw that guy, but we did recruit a couple of freshmen that had heard us talking about our campaign in the hallway. One of them had dyed red curly hair. I looked up across the table one afternoon and my brain told me she was cute. I told it to shut the fuck up and go back to mourning Jackie.

I started jogging to and from school. I don't know if Jackie waited for me on the corner on Monday morning, but she was waiting at my locker on the same afternoon, standing there with her hands linked behind her back. She was a black hole. I wanted to turn and run away but my feet carried me right up to her.

"Need a ride?"

I ran through all of the things I had wanted to say to her in the last couple of days, but none of them came out of my mouth. "I think this is going to be easier for both of us if we don't see each other."

She tried to hide the hurt. I saw it in her eyes. In a sick and twisted way, I was glad. Maybe because it showed I meant as much to her as she did to me, maybe because I was a dysfunctional human being that found pleasure in other people's pain.

She shrugged. "Fine," and rode away alone.

I made amends with Star, at least. She had tried to apologize for disappearing on me several times since summer, but now that I was devoid of energy I couldn't be bothered to turn her away anymore. We went for our official reunion lunch over the weekend, to Barney's diner, of course, and half a rack of ribs later I couldn't remember why I had been mad at her in the first place.

But she noticed that my mind was miles away, and she saw the bags under my eyes. She asked what was wrong. I glanced over to the booth in the center of the restaurant, where Jackie had sobbed into her napkin and kickstarted that incredible day over a month before.

The words came pouring out. I went back to where it all began, with Maria, all the way up to my argument with Jackie. It was a lot to take in at once, but Star was cool with it.

"It doesn't feel fair," I told her. "Just when I find somebody that understands me through and through, they get taken away."

"Have you considered dating long distance?"

"That wouldn't work."

"I don't know, it could. If I was still on Mewni and Marco was here I think we'd try to stay together."

"Yeah... but don't you have a pair of scissors that can teleport you to him whenever you want?"

She blinked. "Yeah, that's a good point."

I sighed out of my nose and picked my nails. "The worst part is, I keep seeing her in school, and I don't know what to do. I don't know whether I want to spend every waking minute with her until she leaves or if I want to totally avoid her."

"Why would you want to avoid her?"

I hunched my shoulders. "I don't know what to say to her. Nothing I say will keep her here. And any time I spend with her would just be clouded by how a month from now she'll be gone for good."

"Then you should tell her that. Tell her exactly how you feel."

"Maybe." But that would require confidence, and I had used up a lifetime of it asking her on a date in the first place.

The thing about Star was that she had to have a solution for everything - she didn't like unresolved problems or lingering dramas. Which was great, sometimes. But my situation with Jackie felt like it _had_ no solution.

"Come to the dance on Friday," she said.

I smirked. "Aren't you supposed to give me a silver rose first?"

"You can come with me and Marco, he'll drive us. His car's a bit messy, but I'll get him to clean it up."

"I dunno, Star."

"Come on," she whined. "It'll be fun. You could do with something to take your mind off things, to remind you there's more to life than Jackie. And hey, you never know, maybe you'll meet somebody new..."

I didn't want somebody new. Anybody new would be a downgrade.

"We could go get you a dress, like, right now. I am _really_ getting good with Earth fashion."

"You're wearing devil horns."

"So? These are _universally_ cute, Janna, everybody knows that."

Star towed me around the local mall, which would have made my mother extremely jealous. She was always trying to drag me along on her shopping sprees, and on the odd occasion I had made the terrible decision to agree. She had spent an hour picking outfits and dressing me up like I was an inanimate life-size doll. Sheesh, never again.

Star was less forceful, more persistent. We circled the mall a couple of times as I passed up every store with a groan, before she finally dragged me by the hand into one that I didn't catch the name of.

I didn't like the three separate bubbly store clerks that approached me and asked if I needed any help (help with what? Dressing myself?), and I didn't like that most of the dresses we looked at were laden with frills, but I did like this one solid black number. It was sleeveless, and came right up to my neck. I took my beanie off in the fitting room and it matched my hair. I was kind of surprised, looking at myself in the mirror. Like I had uncovered something attractive about myself that I'd never known was there.

"How's it going, Janna banana?" Star called out to me.

"Yeah, I think this one works."

"Can I come in?" she asked, and then pushed through the curtain before I could possibly give any response.

Star had the same overenthusiastic reaction that my mom did when I tried the dress on for her that evening.

"Oh, Janna, look at you!"

"Mom, calm down."

"Since when do you care about dressing up all nice?" she squeaked, materializing in the bathroom mirror and squeezing my shoulders.

"You mean... since when do I care about my appearance? That's rude."

"Oh, you know I don't mean it like that. Turn around, let me see the full picture."

I did; she held her hands to her chest. It was flattering, honestly. I know mothers say their children are beautiful no matter what, but from her I could believe it.

"You look beautiful, honey. So, so pretty."

"Thanks, Mom."

"Are you going with somebody?"

"Just Star and Marco. Not Jackie, if that's what you're asking."

"Have you still not spoken to her?"

"No. I don't know if I can. It's too hard."

She smiled at me in the mirror with her lips pressed together tightly, like she had something else to say.

"What?"

"I think we both know you'll regret it if you don't speak to her before she leaves."

Great. I added guilt to the smorgasbord of gloom swarming my head.

Lunch breaks were the worst without Jackie around. Hope, Rachel and Tammy were all Jackie's friends before they were mine, so they tended to drift towards her when we started sitting at separate tables. I wasn't sure how much they knew beyond that we had fallen out. They weren't unpleasant towards me or anything, unless you counted ditching me at lunch as unpleasant. It was fine, I had the obnoxious noise from the kings and queens of popularity on the table behind to keep me company. They spoke like they were from another planet. One of them kept mentioning how he had spent all weekend "crushing puss." I wanted to crush his skull between my fists, give them a talking point they could really sink their teeth into.

On Wednesday, Alfonzo and Ferguson from D&D joined the loser's table, and when I looked up to greet them my eyes picked out the back of Jackie's head in the lunch line. I tracked her all the way to the end of the line, where she turned away from the counter and her eyes landed directly on me. She smiled, I froze up. A sad nostalgia crept over me. It was in this room that she first entered my world.

There's not a lot else to say about those first two weeks in December. They dragged by like a boring nightmare - imagine you're being chased by the most terrifying monster your mind can conceive, but it moves so slowly that it can't keep up with your walking pace, and every time it roars it comes out all quiet and monotonous like a McDonalds employee through a drive-thru speaker. That's kind of what those two weeks felt like.

But I made it to Friday night, when it was time to put everything behind me for a few hours and go to my first stupid teenage dance. I could hardly contain my enthusiasm.

My mom flounced around like a dog in heat, recounting stories of her youth and all the handsome boys that took her to school dances. Mom, I'm sorry I just compared you to a dog. But you were being ridiculous.

She tried to take some pictures, but I refused. I didn't want my misery to be immortalized.

Marco picked me up in his shitty car, as promised. I stuck a piece of gum under the back seat in protest of... I didn't know what. How he had mistreated Jackie? I supposed I could join that club now, too. We were one and the same, Marco and I.

As we approached the school parking lot, I took a long, hard look at the dark, menacing building looming over the street. All the lights were out except in the hallway connected to the main entrance. God, what if I got lost on the way to the gym and ended up walking around school by myself in the dark? Actually, that would be awesome. I'd vandalize so many teacher's desks in the most creative ways.

A guy jumped into the road and flailed his arms around a bit.

Marco slammed on the brakes. "What the-"

The guy, he looked college age, dressed in some kind of red tuxedo, came around to the passenger window and shouted across Star's lap, "we're running a valet service tonight. You have to give me your car."

"Can't I just park it myself?"

"Nah, dude. This is some serious shit they've got going on."

"Okay," Marco said slowly. "Meaning?"

"Marco," Star said under her breath, "don't make a scene. Just hand him the keys."

"But I don't-"

I reached over the center console and dug the keys out of the ignition, tossed them to tuxedo. I was out of the car before I had to listen to Marco's whining. The three of us stood on the pavement and watched the guy speed off down the street. I laughed out loud as he literally drifted the corner, tires screeching, into the parking lot and Marco squirmed.

The steps leading up to the building had been adorned by sparkly silver carpet, and there were two spherical ice sculptures either side of the doors. Snowballs, I imagined. A banner hung from the doorframe welcoming us to the Sophomore Snow Ball, but the illusion ended there. Once we were inside, it looked like the regular old school building we were all sick of walking around in. I wanted my two dollars back.

A lady I didn't recognize took our attendance at the door. In case anybody tried to crash a high school dance? Did that happen? I led the way to the gym, and then halted in the doorway when I saw who was dishing out punch to newcomers. It was Chris, Jackie's brother.

A dozen worst-case scenarios ran through my mind. Jackie was here and she had hired her brother to keep me out at all costs. Jackie had died and her brother was here to break the news to everyone, just before the slow dance so we all put a little more emotion into it. Jackie just being here in general - that was a pretty scary one.

I decided I was being ridiculous, and strode up to the table, where Star and Marco were already being served. Chris looked up at me a couple of times, asked if I wanted punch. I started to think he wouldn't recognize me - I had a forgettable face - but when he looked up a third time he broke out into a smile.

"Hey, Janna. How's it going?"

"Not too bad. You?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm good. What do you think of all this?" He gestured to the decor of the gym.

White balloons dotted around, mounds of unidentified white material - fake snow drifts, and a disco ball. "It's about as shit as I expected."

He laughed. "High school dances tend to get better the older you get. Don't miss prom, that's always a blast."

"I'll bear that in mind. What are you doing here?"

"So I saw an ad on Facebook that they were looking for ex-students to chaperone the dance. Unpaid, so it's kinda bullshit, but I thought I'd come down here and surprise my sister."

I swallowed something in my throat. "Is she here?"

"Haven't seen her. Do you know if she's coming?"

"Um." _Shit. Make something up._ My eyes landed on the buffet table behind him. "I don't know, she might have the shits."

I genuinely, to this day, have no idea why I said that. I think I was experiencing a severe disconnect with reality.

Chris stared at me. "Oh."

"I'll let you know if I see her," I said, snatching up my cup of punch and hurrying back to the people I was familiar with.

The night begun with everyone huddled in their social groups around the outskirts of the room. A few brave souls took to the dance floor early and made themselves the subject of attention. I didn't see a DJ anywhere, but somebody was clearly turning up the volume of the music gradually to entice more people into the center of the room. It was all pop garbage that I would never listen to at home, but I didn't complain out loud because I didn't want my negativity to bring down anyone else's mood. How unusually considerate of me.

I wandered in and out of friendship circles, offering as much to their conversations as I could manage, which wasn't a lot. At one point, Star and I stood alone, sipping from our cups and watching the action (or lack thereof) from afar.

She nudged my shoulder. "So." I didn't like the conspiratorial tone.

"So," I echoed.

"See anybody you like?"

"What?"

"You know. Any _ladies?"_

Like an owl, I checked our perimeter. "Star," I hissed.

"What? I'm trying to figure out what... you know... gets your juices flowing."

"That's gross."

"How about her?" She pointed out Sally Perkins. Long, blonde ponytail. Splash of freckles. Slender frame, pink dress.

"Not my type."

Next, Kyra Winkler. Shoulder-length brunette. Deep red ball gown. Star of the basketball team.

"Too tall."

"What about me?"

"What about you?"

"If I were gay, and single, would you date me?"

I glared at her. "I don't know. Why don't we make out first, and then I'll decide?"

She slapped my arm. _"Janna."_

"Come on," I teased. "Marco will _flip his shit._ It'll be hilarious."

"I would like to leave here tonight with my boyfriend intact, thank you very much."

"It doesn't work like that, anyway," I told her. "I can't tell you who I'd be attracted to just from looking at them. It takes time, getting to know them and stuff."

"You've gotten to know me."

"Okay," I deadpanned. "I'm not attracted to you."

Thinking about it, I _had_ fallen in love with Jackie just by looking at her. She was an exception to every rule, though, I found.

"Why don't you like him?" Star asked me, out of nowhere.

"Huh?"

"Marco. You don't like him. Why not?"

"Well... I don't _not_ like him. It's just that he's Jackie's ex-boyfriend. Don't you ever feel weird around Jackie?"

"No."

"Well you have a utopian view of the world, so I guess you wouldn't."

"Right, right." Marco caught our eyes a feet away and waved at us. Primarily at Star, I presumed. I hadn't given him much reason to be friendly toward me. "What does utopia mean?"

"Just go dance with your boyfriend," I sighed, nudging her with my elbow.

"What? No, I begged you to come here, I'm not leaving you on your own."

"I'm a big girl, Star. I'll be fine."

Marco smiled over at us again.

"Go," I told her.

Their third wheel finally detached, Star and Marco hit the dance floor. I took a few moments to gaze into the crowd of bodies awkwardly bumping against each other as they tried to make the best of the small space they had been given. My bitterness toward Star and Marco had just about faded, and I smiled at how they chuckled together. They made each other happy. And they looked like they had plenty of experience dancing, too, unlike anybody else around them.

It was inevitable - I went for a wander on my own. For a break from the noise, to escape the stuffy atmosphere, or because I felt awkward standing by myself. Pick one.

A left down the first hallway that wasn't lit up. A left, a right, and another right, guiding myself by memory and the light of the moon spilling through windows. I tried the door of the chemistry lab; it was unlocked. Let me assuage your concern right here and tell you, no, I wasn't planning on blowing anything up. They lock away all the dangerous chemicals after school hours anyway.

Instead, I perched on a stool right in the back row of benches, and folded my legs. This had been my seat in Chemistry for the last year and four months. And ever since she had popped up on my radar, it had been the seat from which I had gazed at the back of Jackie's head, two rows in front. Another week, the semester would end for Christmas, and she wouldn't be there anymore.

I felt a familiar strain below my eyes, tears threatening to emerge. I held them back. It dawned on me that I was dwelling on the one thing I had come here to forget about. Maybe this was setting a precedent for the coming months. Or years. Jackie would be on the other side of the country and I would still be picturing her head, there, two rows in front, instead of whoever would be taking her place. No escape.

I pushed the stool back and got to my feet, breathed in, made some kind of involuntary whimpering sound. I couldn't cry because I was wearing a little of Mom's mascara, and it would smudge, and that would be ugly. I decided to head back to the gym, where if nothing else, the music would drown out my thoughts.

I was on autopilot walking along the dark hallway, so it startled me when somebody burst out of a door at my side. It was Ferguson, coming out of the men's bathroom. He looked flustered.

"Oh, hey Janna."

"Ferg. Everything cool?"

"Oh, yeah. Just, you know, trying to get a break from Sarah," he said, nonchalant. Sarah was his girlfriend of about two months now, and she drove him nuts. She was clingy, apparently, and obsessively so. The last time he had tried to break up with her, she laughed in his face, grabbed him by the hand, and dragged him to her car. He didn't tell us what happened when they got inside the car, but he had a bunch of hickeys on his neck for a week.

To top it all off, they were second cousins. This led to an abundance of jokes, as you can imagine. Jokes that would, more often than not, devolve into a serious debate about whether their relationship was incestuous.

"Janna?"

I looked up. "Hmm?"

"You just stared at the floor for, like, twenty seconds. Are you alright?"

I was thinking about the incest thing. "Yeah."

"Alright, well, I think Fonzie brought a deck of cards so we could play poker, if you're interested."

I was interested, as it turned out. I didn't know what else I was going to do here tonight. The list of activities for a single girl like me had already been exhausted. I don't know, I suppose I stuck around because I had this vision that Jackie would ride in on horseback, snatch me up, tell me she had just come from murdering her parents so we could be together forever.

Pretty gruesome, right? Hah. Imagine the kind of things my imagination used to come up with that I _haven't_ told you about.

I played a few hands of poker with Ferguson and Alfonzo on the bleachers, for quarters. I was only vaguely aware of the normal people dancing, until the lights dimmed and the first slow song of the night came on. _I Want to Know What Love Is._ I was down by fifty cents when Sarah (Ferguson's boyfriend, if you struggle with short term memory) barged through a group of guys, looking furious for unknown reasons, and dragged Ferguson out to the floor with zero acknowledgement of myself or Alfonzo. He left his money behind, so I was now up by a dollar fifty. Score.

About a minute into the song, Alfonzo turned to me with a somewhat timid look. I smirked, thinking I knew where this was headed, but a figure appeared in my peripheral vision and stole my attention. It was the red-haired girl from D&D, Charlie, approaching me. My heart jumped to life, pounded excitedly against my rib cage. It promptly deflated when she turned to Alfonzo and asked him to dance.

He looked between the two girls that he apparently had a choice between. Being the selfless soul that I am, I of course nudged him with my foot and told him to dance with her.

I laughed at myself as they disappeared into the crowd, which was a pretty decent reaction to the whole predicament. I was just about as likely to burst into tears. Oh well.

I sipped at my lemonade and pulled out my phone. The time was 9:52PM. I didn't have any messages. I didn't receive messages very often, anymore, since Jackie and I split up.

Well, fitting, I thought, that my night would end this way. Alone, bored, even rejected. Mom would undoubtedly be waiting up for me to ask how tonight went, and I would have to slap on a brave face and assure her that everything went just fine.

A Beach House song came on, which surprised me. I smiled and tapped my foot in time to the slow beat. Jackie got me into them. Jackie. Oh, god, Jackie. This was it now, wasn't it? This was going to be the rest of my high school career. She wouldn't be around to pick me up out of isolation any longer. How bleak.

At the beginning, I told you this was a story about taking chances. I told you how my dad lectured me on how the outcome of taking said chances never really matter, how they never end up as bad as you think they will. Well, there on the bleachers, a lonely soul separate from a sea of people I would most likely never really connect with, I started to think that my dad was wrong. I had taken a chance when I asked Jackie out, and maybe if she had rejected me outright, my dad's advice would have been sound. Like, okay, she didn't like me in that way, but we could still be friends. I could have handled that.

But she had said yes, and we had had a taste of what it was like to be together. And it was stripped away from us prematurely, because we were young and we were not in total control of our own lives. We were joined at the hip but powerless to stop the force driving us apart.

And my heart fucking _ached_ because of it, like no pain I had ever experienced. Every time I thought about it, about the countless hours in our rooms, about her head buried in a book, about our spot on the hill where we watched the sunsets, about the way she chirped my name, about her lips brushing mine, about her breath, her touch, her scent, I felt hollow inside. She was a piece of my puzzle and I had lost her.

And if I had known, on that day on the porch of Maria Williams' old house after our near-death skateboarding experience, if I had known that dating Jackie Lynn Thomas would eventually spiral me into despair?

Well, sorry Dad, but I don't know if I would have taken that chance all over again. I don't know if the pain was worth it.

Someone tapped on my shoulder. I turned around and saw Chris sit down on the bench behind me. He didn't say anything, just looked ahead into the communion of dancers. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe caring for the lost lambs of the world was hardwired into his DNA. The music ticked over to a song I didn't recognize.

"Doesn't look like my sister's gonna show up, does it?" Chris said into my ear.

I shook my head.

He sighed. "I could have been at home with my feet up and a beer in my hand right now."

I smiled. Didn't know what to say.

"I never used to dance at these things either," he told me. "I mean, look at them, none of them know what they're doing." He extended his finger past my shoulder. My eyes followed it. "That kid's suit is two sizes too big for him and his shoelaces are untied. And he keeps looking around the room like he's bored of the girl he's dancing with. Look at her face, she's clearly sick of him."

That made me laugh.

"And it's supposed to be a couples dance, but count how many people are swaying around by themselves."

"Better than being sat here though," I said.

"Nah. There's a dignity to it, you know? Sitting on the sidelines. You're not responding to the peer pressure, telling you you have to be out there dancing because everybody else is."

I grinned. I didn't think he believed that, he was just trying to make me feel better. He would have made a great brother-in-law.

"I'm gonna take off," he said. "Punch bowl's empty anyway."

"Yeah... I might make my escape too."

Chris asked me if I needed a ride anywhere, but I told him I'd walk. I needed time to think, alone. We climbed down from the bleachers and made our way to the exit.

I always find it hard to describe how I felt during what happened next. Jackie asks me about it a lot - what was going through my head when I saw her, because apparently I looked mortified. She weaved in and out of individuals on the outskirts of the dance floor, in a lime green dress. Her eyes met mine a couple of times but when she reached me and Chris, all of her focus was on him.

I thought the song playing had incorporated some kind of experimental high-pitched monotone, but it was just the ringing in my ears. Jackie exchanged greetings with her brother that I couldn't hear, but I caught the gist of it: _What are you doing here? Came down to surprise you, nice of you to finally show up._

I was aware of my fingers twitching uncontrollably at my sides, so I shoved my hands behind my back, out of sight. A few moments later Jackie stepped right up to me, said "hey." My mind, of course, went into overdrive trying to figure out what this meant for our relationship. I attempted to say hello back, nothing happened.

Chris tapped his sister on the arm, said, "I need to head off."

"I just got here," Jackie complained. "You're not gonna stay and hang out?"

"I have early lectures."

She slapped his chest. "You don't go to lectures."

"Okay, my friend just texted me saying he's coming over tonight and he's bringing pot. Is that honest enough for you?"

"Better. Fine, go on, run along and fry your brain," she said, shooing him away with her hand. She was wearing a bracelet made out of sea shells that I had never seen before. My mind, of course, interpreted this as her having found a new significant other who was already treating her better than I ever did.

"You staying or going, Janna?" Chris said.

A couple of seconds went by before I remembered that Janna was my name. Two pairs of eyes were on me.

"Oh, are you leaving?" Jackie asked.

At this point, I had taken a few steps in following Chris to the exit, so I was sort of both hovering and looking between the siblings wondering which direction would cause me less emotional torment in the long run.

"Yeah, I was going to, uh..."

"Oh, okay," Jackie said, her hands clasped at her front. The last remaining trace of her smile vanished.

I couldn't tear my eyes away. "But I can stay. For a little bit."

For a moment, it was like both of us had forgotten Chris was still there. He called out, "see you guys later," waved, and pushed through the herd of fifteen-year-olds.

We watched him go, right up until he was out of the gym and out of our sight. Then we turned to each other. Jackie scanned my body, to my black tights, to my black shoes, and back up. She smiled and said, "how are you?"

My mind, of course, interpreted this banal smalltalk as her saying she didn't really want to know me anymore. "I'm fine," I lied. "You?"

"I'm okay."

I wasn't sure where to fix my eyes after that. I surveyed the room and tried to calm myself by focusing on the music. In an ideal world, the lyrics would have correlated to whatever was transpiring between myself and Jackie, but they didn't.

"We should dance," Jackie said to me. White orbs of light from the disco ball fluttered across her dress and her face. I was so mesmerized by her eyes that I didn't notice her pick up my hand. "If you want to."

I glanced down at my hand, in her palm, marveled at how my fingers wrapped around it so instinctively. Amidst the panic shrouding my mind, I gave a barely noticeable nod. It was straight out of a dream sequence, how she led me to the edge of the dance floor, but my dreams had never felt so vivid. Her hands landed on the nape of my neck, and mine reached for her hips. This close, I could inspect each freckle on her cheeks, just as I used to as we lay face-to-face in my bed.

Something softened in Jackie's expression, like she was about to cry. "You look beautiful," she told me.

My eyebrows drew together. _She should be mad at me,_ I kept thinking. I was the reason we had wasted the last two weeks apart from one another. "You look... you have no idea."

The corner of her lips tweaked upwards. "Can I tell you something?"

My head nodded.

"When I was little, my dad taught me something. He told me... I should always remember to be a risk-taker, because if you don't take risks, the greatest thing in the world might pass you by."

I blinked. Were our dads brothers?

"I think you're my greatest thing, Janna. I think all of the fears I had about... being 'out,' about who I am, all of that is insignificant compared to being able to spend even three weeks with you."

I swallowed a tennis ball. Everything went blurry, behind a shield of tears. I blinked them away. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry I made it out to be so easy, I know it isn't like that for every-"

She kissed me. Her lips tasted like peaches, and a single tear added salt. When our lips parted, a sudden recollection of where we were prompted me to fervently scan the room.

"Don't focus on them," Jackie said, instantly regaining my attention. "Let's just focus on us tonight. I don't know how many of these moments we have left."

"You're the best thing that's ever happened to me," I told her. "I don't know how I'm gonna cope with you leaving."

"I know. I don't either. But how about we make the most of these last few weeks, huh? No more fighting. No more avoiding each other."

My head rocked back and forth again. "I'm sorry."

"Shut up, it's not your fault," she smirked. "We both said dumb things."

Jackie and I escaped the gymnasium, left the school, stepped out into the night hand in hand. I can't tell you if anybody watched us go, or had anything bitter to say, because I was fixated on her. We retraced our skateboarding route back to my house, reminiscing along the way as if we had been apart for years. We talked about Christmas. I realized I had yet to buy anything for my parents. Jackie would spend her Christmas packing boxes, and I would spend mine lying in bed wishing New York City was demolished in a flash flood. Where all the people get out safely, of course. I wasn't _that_ much of a psychopath.

My parents had left the hallway light on, but they were upstairs in bed. I tugged Jackie inside and we tiptoed up the stairs. The novelty of wearing a dress had by now certainly worn off, so I left her alone on my bed while I slipped into the bathroom with some sweatpants and a t-shirt. I changed, and spent some time staring at my reflection in the mirror. Not too long, because she freaked me out a little. She had really cold eyes, like she was trying to tell me something. Maybe, _you have three weeks left to engrave Jackie's face in your memory and you're standing here by yourself instead._

I crept back to my bedroom door and slinked inside. The lamp on my desk cast dim light over Jackie's face. She was entranced by her phone, but the screen was off.

Something was wrong. I took two uncertain steps toward her. "Jackie?"

She looked up. Then around the room. Then back up at me. "My dad just called me."

My heart stilled.

"He said he... he told his boss to shove the position in New York up his ass."

I felt my jaw unhinge.

Jackie stood up from the bed and closed the distance between us. "He said no paycheck was worth moving across the country and disrupting his family's lives. He said he was sorry for putting me in such a difficult position in the first place. I- I'm not moving. I'm not going anywhere."

My body shivered, all of its organs thrumming with wonder, but it stayed frozen in place. I didn't know what to do, or what to say. We had prepared for death, only for the Grim Reaper to tell us we were going to be spared. My eyebrows knitted together. "What do we do now?"

She beamed. The smile I fell in love with. "Well, do you wanna do this for real?"

"Do what?"

"Be my girlfriend."

Usually, I might have been able to come up with something witty, or flirty. But my brain was working at double-speed just to determine if this was really happening. "Yes," I deadpanned.

"Okay," she hummed, and skipped across the carpet to the door.

 _Where are you going?_ the voice inside my head screamed. _Come back!_

"Then we had best do this properly. I'll see you tomorrow at Barney's. 2PM?"

"Okay," I heard myself say.

Then she was gone. I fell backwards in slow motion, heard the bed springs creak beneath me. A cloud of her perfume dispersed, and I shut my eyes to inhale the scent. When I was done giggling to myself, I curled up and fell asleep, and put the lonely feeling that had nested inside me to rest forever.

* * *

 _ **A/N:** Thank you for reading, and Merry Christmas!_


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